Friday, 13 August 2004

Domino theory. Beneath all the scare tactics about WMDs and Al Qaeda, the neocon case for war in Iraq was based on a radical premise: That we could invade Iraq, topple Saddam, establish a democratic government, and then leverage that success to spread democracy throughout the Mideast. It was the Cold War's domino theory in reverse; knock down a tyrant, they said, and the surrounding despots will fall.

Spreading democracy throughout the Mideast is an excellent, excellent goal, and ultimately it's the key to victory in protecting America from terrorist attack. We know that terrorism finds its motive in politics, and in political pressures that have no outlet within the ruling system: From Basque separatists to the Irish Republican Army, from Al Qaeda to the Ku Klux Klan, the common theme among terrorists is a cause that authority has denied. We know that democracy grants a hearing to even the most radical of proposals: By offering hope that they too might someday sway the masses, free speech gives fringe groups an incentive to follow the law. In principle and in practice, democracy is an effective antidote to terrorism — and, regardless, democracy is the only form of government that America holds to be legitimate. We should encourage it wherever we can.

So the problem with this grand neocon strategy isn't the objective. It's the execution where I think the Bush administration has run aground; we achieved the "topple Saddam" part flawlessly, but the step where we were supposed to build a democracy has turned out to be much harder than the initial neocon projections. It turns out setting up the initial conditions for a democracy is harder than it looks, especially in a country that's never had one and has no nearby example to follow. (Our success in transplanting democracy to Eastern Europe was much more a function of proximity to Western Europe; neocons like to think it was the spontaneous result of Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, but I think all those role models on the other side of the Iron Curtain had more than a little to do with it.)

I have nothing but admiration for the men and women of our armed forces, who are over there flailing away trying to establish civil order — but building a successful democracy in Iraq requires more than just military force. Iraq's middle class, the doctors and lawyers and professors who would form the backbone of civil society, are in hiding; the diplomats and foreign aid workers who should be building Iraq's social capital have fled. The political system we've established is starting to look more like Hosni Mubarak's Egypt than a functioning democracy; Ayad Allawi is consolidating his hold on power, and possibly setting himself up to be Prime Minister-for-life.

My sense now is that George W. Bush has neither the political capital nor the international prestige to follow through on the neocon vision, if indeed that vision was ever possible. In fact, I suspect that no Republican, in the present circumstances, can lead us to victory in the so-called War on Terror: It's an "only Nixon can go to China" problem, but in reverse. Only a Democrat can now argue the case for democracy without getting tangled up in doctrines of pre-emption and intelligence failures; Bush and his GOP colleagues can't make the argument effectively.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:53 pm. comments.