Posted by
Wil on Thursday, July 19, 2007 5:12:54 AM
This is an extremely long post. Keslers quotes are in italics, my responses in regular print. I found this article fascinating, though I disagreed with his conclusion. Feel free to read either these excerpts or the whole article on the previous post.
Neither the Gulf War of 1991 nor the campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11 had prepared Americans for the protracted conflict in Iraq. Nor had the administration, of course, which itself was caught by surprise. But in war surprises happen. What the public found less forgivable was the widening gap between the administration's overall view of the war and the realities of the war zone. "Shock and awe" did neither, at least for very long. Though our troops liberated millions, the Iraqis seemed strangely ungrateful, even resentful. Saddam swung from the gallows, but the onlookers cheered not for a free Iraq but for a Shiite leader. The weapons of mass destruction proved elusive, but not as elusive as Iraqi democracy, the establishment of which had become central to the administration's war aims.
In the post Vietnam world, American politicians feared a Vietnam-like quagmire that would bring back the vitriol and anger of the 60’s and 70’s. The three methods for military action became:
1) Shock and Awe: Come in with guns blazing, level the place, and walk away, blowing the smoke from your gun considering the war won. This was Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Haiti, and the fighting phase of Gulf War II and Afghanistan.
2) International Police Actions: The idea is if the whole world supports us, then the folks at home will too. Low risk operations. This was Lebanon, Gulf War I, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and to some extent Afghanistan.
3) Lay Waste and Walk: Not yet used, but favored by the Paleoconservatives. To them, we come in in shock and awe, and what results is none of our concern. The idea is, our advantage is technology and firepower. We use this, disdaining to ever solve the internal issues that may lead to unstable and angry enemies. If they mess with us they die. Simple as that.
So the question is, why did the Iraqis not flock to our banner? The answers are 1975, 1983, 1991, and 1993. For the last 30 years, every time we come in claiming to change things, we bail out when the going gets tough. In 1975, the Vietnamese, the Hmong, and the Cambodians who supported us paid with their lives when the Communists swarmed in behind our retreat from Saigon. The Repercussions against the sopporters of American policy were merciless and brutal. In 1983-84, the same thing happened to those who tried to cooperate with our peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. In 1991, the same thing happened to those who rose up at our behest in Iraq. The No Fly Zones were a half hearted measure to protect these people. In 1993, the few Somalis who supported us undoubtedly paid a price. The point is, they had seen over and over, three times in their own region, that to side with the Americans was to be destroyed after they left.
Why was establishing Democracy central? This comes up later.
Despite scores of presidential speeches on why America was fighting in Iraq, the public grew less and less sure why this was our war. Americans wondered more and more about the war's purpose, about what our victory would consist in. That is why the least effective anti-war taunt was "no war for oil." At least a war for oil would be understandable; the means could be linked to an attainable end. By contrast, the critics' most effective charge was that the Bush Administration was out of its depth, that the whole enterprise was fantastic, disproportionate, unwise.
Even if the surge policy works as promised, the latter criticism will not go away. For the surge is calculated merely to stabilize Baghdad and its environs, to make it possible to win hearts and minds there and in crucial provinces like Al Anbar. That is not victory; it is at best a necessary condition of victory over the jihadists, or of some other large purpose, not excluding American withdrawal. The surge is only a means, and what the American people wonders increasingly about is the end. If the administration or, more to the point now, Republican candidates for the presidency and Congress do not develop a better account of the purpose of U.S. policy in Iraq, then in 2008 the public may deal even more roughly with the party than it did in 2006.
The purpose of fighting in Iraq is essentially Wilsonian: The idea that if one Arab nation is formed into a functioning Western style Democracy, it will inspire others like Egypt and Jordan to moderate and emulate it, it will cause autocratic and hostile regimes to curb their anti-Americanism to avoid invasion and replacement, and finally, if young angry Arabs and Muslims see their nations stabilizing and providing them opportunity, they will be less willing to die for Jihad because they will no longer be hopeless. This premise recognizes that many Jihadists are American or European immigrants living in relative wealth, but assumes that some of their resentment comes from the fact that those of their own race and religion only seem to succeed when removed from their world and transplanted to a foreign one. If any Arab nation became a rousing success, their anger too would dissipate.
So why Iraq?
1) Iraq compared with Jordan, Syria, the Gulf States, and The Maghreb, has much more potential economically strategically and politically to affect change in its neighbors. It is among the larger Arab nations, has a decent infrastructure, and has substantial resources to sustain its growth.
2) Iraq had a leader who needed to be removed. Hated by most of his subjects, feared and despised by almost all of his neighbors, openly supportive of terrorism, and most of all, already pinned down by an imperfect and crumbling set of sanctions, no fly zones, and UN resolutions. Iraq was the most obvious choice for the experiment of Arab Democracy. Afghanistan was too remote from the region and not Arab. Syria had done nothing we could pin on them as anti-American. And Iran could not be dealt with until Iraq was stable.
3) Iraq had flouted numerous UN resolutions, shot at our planes enforcing the no fly zones, been behind an attempt to assassinate a former US President, openly supported Hamas and evidence pointed to links with other terror organizations. Iraq had used Chemical Weapons on its own Kurds, and every intelligence agency in the world believed as recently as the late 90’s that Saddam was still in control of Chemical and possibly Biological Weapons. The Nuclear Program was more tenuous, but even that had much backing. Bush did not have to “fake” intel, all of this was considered reliable and accurate.
The Bush Lied, People Died mantra has been repeated so often, that about 40% of people believe some of the pre war intelligence was intentionally exaggerated. This is the result of masterful media manipulation of reality and poor communication by Bush and his team. In all honesty though, Bush could be a perfect communicator, and the media would effectively distort it.
The Bush Doctrine includes first preemptive and preventive war, waged unilaterally if necessary, against terrorists and regimes that were plotting attacks against the United States, even if those attacks were not imminent. And second, the commitment to the global advance of democracy. Regimes that might pass along WMDs to terrorists simply could not be trusted with such weapons. Therefore those regimes must in the interim be denied dangerous nuclear technology, but in the long run be changed into peaceful, commercial democracies
I believe that this has never adequately been explained or debated. I would love to see this presented to each of the candidates, then they must either support, modify or rebut this doctrine to suit their own views.
In trying to connect "the survival of liberty in our land" with "the success of liberty in other lands," Bush had to avoid two distasteful and unsustainable extremes. On the one hand, the link between our security and their liberty could be a nebulous kind of hope--that foreign nations would democratize more or less on their own (perhaps with some gentle hand-holding by the United Nations), and that our security would be an unintended beneficiary. But that would soon become a formula for frustration or resignation: American liberty "increasingly" would depend on something beyond our control, namely, other countries' domestic politics. At the opposite extreme, Bush's words might imply an imperial policy of democracy promotion or perhaps colonization, like the French in the early stages of their Revolution or Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Our freedom could not survive, in this view, unless we imposed democracy in "all the world," or at least the relevant parts of it, despite what the inhabitants of those parts might prefer.
Bush tried to find a prudent middle way between these idealist and ultra-realist traps, but he did not make much headway. He said that "the great objective of ending tyranny" is "the concentrated work of generations," an infelicitous phrase with no assignable meaning. He affirmed that "America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause." But he did not go on to promise that the U.S. military would be vastly enlarged, or radically re-tasked, or that any other concrete steps would be taken to match our influence to "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Indeed, he counseled that "this is not primarily the task of arms," that "freedom, by its nature, must be chosen," and that the issue will in most instances be decided only when "the soul of a nation finally speaks."
The problem is that Bush wants to be both "idealistic" and prudent at the same time. He wants to take credit for proclaiming the lofty, breathtaking, galvanizing moral imperative, which is all of these things precisely because it is stubbornly opposed to the maxims of experience, impatient with the self-love integral to human nature, and insistent that duty requires maximum striving for the impossible dream, precisely because it seems impossible. That's his idealism. In that sense, global democracy is his War on Poverty. But at the same time he wants to be sober, responsible, and popular. He wants to bring democracy to every nation (and culture!) and to end tyranny in our world--but not immediately, and not by our efforts alone, and not at the expense of local customs and traditions, and not at the risk of our authoritarian allies, and not by force except in rare cases. These are all sensible limitations, of course, but what then is left of the original idealistic policy that made the blood race and the head swoon? He really can't have it both ways.
Or perhaps he can have it both ways--if there is a guarantee of some sort, in human nature or divine will, that history will make everything work out, that the idealist will ultimately be vindicated on realist grounds. And that is just the sort of guarantee that Bush routinely invokes in order to get his analysis from here to there, from prudence to idealism. "Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul," he said in the Second Inaugural.
The thing is, I believe Bush. I believe there is in every heart a desire and a passion for freedom. How else do you explain the rapid Democratization of the Eastern Bloc as it fell away from Soviet influence. Or the imperfect but still real Democratization of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Asian nations? The cynic will say, as the colonists did generations ago, that some peoples are incapable of Democracy. But we have seen time and again nations written off achieve it in their own way and time. The hard part is doing it quickly and doing it in a hostile violent place. South Korea took most of the last 60 years to develop into a Western Style Democracy. There are still many differences, and always will be, between their nation and the US in style and form. But both are stable, secure, and allow their citizens to exercise the gift of unalienable rights.
For its inspiration, the Bush Doctrine looks both to Abraham Lincoln and to Woodrow Wilson. It aspires, on the one hand, to a new birth of democratic freedom around the world, and on the other, to a new world order based on a new freedom that at last makes tyranny obsolete, and the return of tyranny, except perhaps for a glitch now and then, impossible.
But unfortunately for the administration's foreign policy, the Lincolnian and Wilsonian premises cannot be reconciled.
Lincoln thought it impossible to end injustice and tyranny on earth; human nature, torn between right and wrong, divided between reason and passion, was permanently at war with itself. Wilson looked forward to the worldly culmination of liberty and justice. History guaranteed it, in some sense. President Bush sides with Wilson in the supreme confidence that history has "a visible direction," and that mortals are capable of "ending tyranny in our world."
And yet Lincoln did act militarily to end an extreme injustice. His goal was always a United nation, but from my reading of Lincoln, I think he always recognized that for true unity, tyranny (in the form of Slavery) must be ended. Sort of like Paul describes a Christian life as “Striving to be Christlike, knowing it is unattainable”, nations too must strive for justice, unity and freedom, knowing that we are incapable of finding the perfect balance.
The article then gets into a discussion of Neoconservative and Realist and Liberal variants. This is fascinating, but not terribly helpful except that it highlights where critics are coming from background wise and allows for better dissection of their arguments.
As an abstract matter, Americans would like to see every nation in the world enjoy the blessings of liberty and democracy, because we know how fine these are. But the matter at hand is a question not of good will but of good policy. Is Iraq worth it?
President Bush and the neocons make a strong case that Iraq is important to America's own security, but the case for toppling Saddam was much stronger than the one for staying indefinitely to buy time for the Iraqis to democratize. Saddam was in violation of the peace agreements he had signed to end the Gulf War; had invaded his neighbors and would likely do so again; was supporting terrorism and sponsoring anti-Americanism throughout the Arab world, including a failed plot to assassinate former President Bush; refused to dispel, and indeed encouraged, the impression that Iraq had chemical, biological, and nuclear WMDs, some of which Saddam had used before; and withal he was a bloodthirsty tyrant. The writ to use force against him and his regime was cogent and persuasive. But the decision to turn that deterrent, punitive, and preventive action into the occasion for elaborate democratic reconstruction was, alas, ill-conceived. Iraq was not that important to us. It could seem that important to us, as important as Germany and Japan had been, only by imagining that an utterly transformed Iraq would become an outpost of liberal democracy in the Middle East, a bulwark against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism; and that Iraq in turn would utterly transform the whole Middle East into a land of milk and honey, not to mention democracy and peace.
Democracy is a middle-class thing, and to that extent they are right. But many neocons often don't quite see what a high and difficult calling republicanism is. Paradoxically, their biggest mistake is not thinking too highly of democracy but not thinking highly enough of it. By underestimating it and what it requires of its citizens, they conclude that democracy is more easily exportable and transferable than it really is. And they neglect all the other forms of government between the best and the worst-forms that might be more congenial to many countries capable of something better than tyranny but incapable, at least now, of the best sorts of republicanism.
It is difficult, though not impossible, to have an enduring liberal democracy unless it gets its first principles right, and unless it cultivates them by means of a good constitution and civic character. But this watchword is less prominent in the present-day expansion of democracy than you might expect. If it were, many democracies formed in the past few decades would not qualify. Most of them were not well founded, if they were founded at all; a lot of them just happened, without much forethought or civic conviction, and could just as easily unhappen.
Clarity and agreement on liberal principles was not foremost, either, in the minds of the Americans busily engaged in founding Iraqi democracy. There, in the usual State Department fashion, the controlling idea seemed to be to get as many factional leaders as possible around the biggest possible table, induce them to compromise or postpone their differences, subscribe to a pastiche of principles, often contradictory, that the U.N. will applaud, usher in the coalition government, issue their paychecks-and call it democracy and a day's work well done.
This is where my biggest problem with the “Realists” comes into play. If we simple topple a corrupt Saddam and get out of the way, what will happen? The Shi’ites and Kurds would take advantage of the vacuum and get revenge for the horrible things done to them. Then the Sunnis would turn to Saudi Arabia and Egypt for support, to enact their own revenge. Like the Balkans, it’s a never ending cycle of violence. Most realists would say “So What.” As long as none of them are strong enough to hurt us, let them kill each other. But this is not viable in a world in which any angry person can get a WMD, hop a plane, and detonate it in SeaTac airport, the Sears Tower, or Between the Hedges at a Georgia College Football game. The premise of nation building may be naïve, but shock, awe, and walk away, seal the borders and hope for the best, is not viable. We have over 10,000 miles of border and coastline. Most of it is vulnerable. We can do better, but we cannot make our nation impenetrable. We must combine our home security with a plan to change the reality of the Middle East. It may be somewhat Wilsonian and naïve, but the alternative we know does not work. We have a “benevolent dictator in Pakistan. How helpful has he been? We have a monarch in Jordan and another in Saudi Arabia who profess friendship but placate extremists at home. Wehave pseudo democracies in Egypt and Iran. One lacks the mandate to help and so again placates the extremists within, while the other openly seeks our destruction. To make a viable free Iraq will take many years. But this, and the influence it would bring tobear on its neighbors, is our hope of security. The “Realists” brought us the Shah, the Hashemite and Sa’ud Kings, and the Gulf Emirates. None of these countries are stable and reliable as allies, and all supply disgruntled citizens to the Jihad. We must see this through. There is no viable plan B.