Exporting Democracy: What Have We Learned from Iraq?
Benhabib, Seyla
FVEN THOSE, like myself, who opposed the Iraq War from the start on moral, legal, and strategic grounds cannot rejoice at whatever confirmation of our judgment comes from the scene of carnage,...
...to the illegal wiretapping of millions of American citizens, this administration has time and again proved that one cannot hope to promote democracy abroad if one has supreme contempt for democracy and the rule of law at home...
...The north will remain under Kurdish control, and the south and east will be dominated by the Shiite majority...
...Saddam is restive and starts courting Islamicist militants and sympathizers throughout the Middle East by wearing a beard, attending Friday prayers, and using frequent references to the Koran in his speeches...
...The Iraqi Constitution is explicitly federalist and encourages power and revenue-sharing among major regional, ethnic, and religious groups...
...The old theological battles between itinerant Islamicist preachers and the more structured theological Islamic bureaucracy in cities like Iran's Kum are brewing, with implications far into the future...
...Yet the looting of Iraq's National Museum and other government buildings and public institutions, as well as the speedy collapse of civil order in the country, make the victorious allies nervous...
...and the spectacle of a superpower, mightier then ever in military terms, but increasingly losing its legitimacy, prompts anxious analogies to doomed empires of the past...
...Her most recent publication is Another Cosmopolitanism, with comments by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig, and Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 2006...
...Even an illegal war could have turned out otherwise, I would argue, if this administration had not projected its dogmatic beliefs in free markets, contempt for the rule of law, and utter disregard for deep human diversity onto Iraq...
...March 19, 2003, comes and goes, and the United States and its allies do not invade Iraq...
...Despite the dangers of 20/20 hindsight, there is something salutary in proposing some other, hypothetical, narratives about roads not taken...
...The no-fly zone over Kurdish Iraq would have continued, with sanctions against Iraq under some form...
...more than a hundred thousand people would not have been wounded and maimed...
...History buffs recall Napoleon's march into the Russian winter and the eventual decimation of the French Army...
...The contest of narratives over who did what wrong, when, and how has begun...
...protectorate, until free elections can take place and a government formed...
...it would not have lost the world's moral sympathy...
...Most important, the Iraqi professional and middle classes, who had such high hopes for the new Iraq and who were crucial to the reconstruction, would not have had to go into exile...
...Consequently, there is much less unemployment, fewer weapons depots are looted, fewer uniforms stolen, and the former officials do not abet a growing insurgency...
...The Afghan War against the Taliban is under way...
...SEYLA BENHABIB is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University...
...In this morally compromised world, the dictates of realpolitik would have kept a tyrant in place...
...A conference is convened among Iraq's neighbors...
...nearly three million of 44 DISSENT / Spring 2007 Iraq's population would not have been rendered refugees or displaced...
...Only by picking up the pieces of a past that is in fragments can we envisage a future for Iraq—if at all...
...Hamas in particular is undecided between its Sunni and Shiite patrons...
...the Middle East is perched on a precipice...
...they may prove dangerous in the future...
...Neighboring Iran is quiescent and watchful...
...Conceivably, the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union, in alliance with Iraq's traditional patron states—France and Russia—could have exercised some influence over Saddam to keep Iraq's borders tight and not to permit infiltration by al-Qaeda...
...UN inspectors have visited Iraq, and despite uncertainty about several tons of liquid chemicals with the potential to become weapons, weapons of mass destruction have not been found...
...Alas, the lawbreakers abroad are still the lawmakers at home, even if with reduced power after the fall 2006 elections...
...The United States would not be in violation of international law...
...administration is playing its cards close to the vest...
...the resentment of Europe's many and diverse Muslims against their host countries is brewing, but there is no unified object on which to focus hatred...
...There is "institutional tinkering," and Iraq is moved toward a consociational and strongly multicultural democracy...
...Baghdad has been divided into predominantly Shiite neighborhoods in the east and Sunni neighborhoods in the west, with the river Tigris separating them...
...Saddam's statue has fallen, and Saddam himself has been captured...
...Thought Experiment I: The War Never Started We are back in the fall of 2002...
...There would not have been more than 150,000 Iraqi civilians and more than three thousand American troops killed...
...The Iraqi Army, it is noted, is not the German Wehrmacht, and after the arrest of officers charged with major human rights violations, the army is not disbanded...
...Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza and Nasrallah in Lebanon are not strategic players at this stage...
...It has often been noted that there is a strange symbiosis between wars abroad and conditions at home...
...I propose to engage in two thought experiments about what could have been...
...designs on and interests in Iraq...
...He is flown to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where he is expected to be charged with "crimes against humanity" for his gassing of Kurds, the brutal murder of Shiites in the south, and the eradication of the Marsh Arabs...
...Instead, Iraq is declared a UN, not a U.S...
...Chalabi, the notorious embezzler of the Jordanian Petra Bank, is out of the picture completely...
...He is concerned about a group called AnsarelIslam in the northeast corner of Iraq...
...and in the long run, the Iraqi opposition in exile might still have had a chance to topple Saddam, but without the meddling of dishonest brokers such as Ahmed Chalabi...
...These are al-Qaeda sympathizers and are busy attacking the Kurdish Pesh Merga...
...Now, in contrast, the partition of Iraq into warring regions under the influence of neighboring powers is inevitable...
...The supervision and operation of Iraq's oil fields are turned over to a UNsanctioned body or to some other agency that involves NATO, the EU, and the Russians, as well as the United States and its allies...
...Despite the ongoing struggle in Chechnya, Islamic jihad is not a worldwide phenomenon, and loyalties in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world remain divided among crisscrossing ethnic, religious, and local ties . How long could the state of affairs in this thought experiment have continued...
...In the ensuing years, there is no terrorism in Madrid and London...
...The U.S...
...The world is a more dangerous place than at any time after September 11, 2001...
...Can we trust this "cakewalk," they ask...
...Thought Experiment II: The War Takes Place Consider now an alternative scenario: The United States and its allies have gone to war against Iraq...
...Could it have lasted...
...Iraq's oil income is deposited in banks that will come under the authority of a duly constituted Iraqi government...
...Fewer jihadi fighters would have been able to enter Iraq across the Syrian and Jordanian borders...
...Iran could have been given assurances that its territorial integrity would be protected...
...FVEN THOSE, like myself, who opposed the Iraq War from the start on moral, legal, and strategic grounds cannot rejoice at whatever confirmation of our judgment comes from the scene of carnage, political turpitude, and human misery presented by contemporary Iraq...
...The United States and its allies give clear guarantees that they will not control Iraq's oil fields or establish strategic strongholds in the area indefinitely...
...Private security firms, such as Blackwater, are either not permitted in at all or come under strict army supervision...
...Baathist party officials who are civil leaders in industry, engineering, electricity, and the oil sector are not dismissed...
...Kurdish autonomy is protected, but demands for Kurdish supremacy in towns like Kirkuk, at the expense of the Turkomans and Arabs, will not be condoned...
...from the practice of "extraordinary renditions," which involve detaining and kidnapping citizens of foreign countries and sending them to undisclosed locations in other countries...
...Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Iran are asked to guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity, with assurances in turn that they will not be threatened by irredentist forces coming out of Iraq...
...I think so...
...As Edmund Burke, who DISSENT / Spring 2007 45 initiated the impeachment of Warren Hastings in the British House of Commons on account of the administrative massacres he had committed against the native Indian population, observed, "the law-breakers in India cannot be law-makers at home...
...Moktada alSadr would have been less suspicious of longterm U.S...
...IS THIS SCENARIO plausible...
...The Iraq War was carried out by an administration that believed that a complex and ancient society with many divided allegiances and a bitter history of colonization could be treated as if it were a tabula rasa onto which to project freemarket fundamentalisms, contempt for constitutional constraints as well as international law, and a naïve faith in the power of technological superiority to overwhelm a people demoralized by twenty-five years of despotic rule...
...Iraq's influential and extensive public industrial sector—from the manufacture of toilet bowls and light bulbs to shampoo and oil pipes—is not dismantled...
...From Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib...
...Iran sees signs of implosion in the House of Saud...
...Chickens come home to roost," "dangerous entanglements abroad," and transgressions against the republic at home go hand in hand...
...there is a lot of scratching of heads about how a member of the Saudi royal family, Osama bin Laden, could emerge as one of the most dangerous and charismatic leaders of the Islamic world...
...fewer Iraqi military and civilian elites would have been inclined to support the insurgency...
...There is no Coalition Provisional Authority directed by Paul Bremer III, a free-market fundamentalist, bestriding the Iraqi territory in his Land's End boots...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
