Exporting Democracy: What Have We Learned from Iraq?
Cohen, Mitchell
"MR. AND Ms. LEFT, tear down these words: Totalitarianism, Imperialism. No, I don't mean that our voices ought not to roar against these bad, brutal things, just that we should stop using...
...Saddam had totalitarian aspirations, but his regime's terrifying reign did not rest solely on a party-state with an ideology...
...In books, op-eds, and sound bites, we are treated to a parade of authorities, many of whom could not have found Kirkuk on a map five years ago...
...That's right, Leo Strauss, for his many sins, is not the key...
...Power depended significantly on tribal and clan ties in a society with a complex mix of religious and ethnic divisions, identities, and loyalties...
...Nonetheless, it is true that the development of democracy is stimulated more often by external trauma than its advocates like to admit...
...Japan, for instance, is a contradictory case, and even complicates some points I've just made...
...The problem arises when "totalitarianism" becomes a total explanation rather than one tool among others, and when this heuristic ideal-type is mistaken for more complex realities...
...LET'S RETURN tO the dust-bin...
...Instead, you may find three very different communities with different agendas, interests, identities, memories, and thus different understandings of what the old regime meant and democracy implies...
...Yet why suppose that those Baathists and many Sunnis who had everything to lose by its fall would not resist as they ruled, that is, viciously, ruthlessly, brutally...
...The ideas we use, including democracy, must be a function of what they engage, not our intellectual vanities...
...The "anti-totalitarianism" approach assumed Iraqi Jeffersonians would emerge from the big bang...
...Arrogant idealism" (Dower) worked somehow in Japan but not at all in Iraq...
...Recall an old debate, now in the dust-bin of history, that vexed the historic left: Are there preconditions for socialism...
...Some aspects of them are pertinent, others not...
...Rousseau protested rightly in The Social 'The Shaat al-Arab is a short waterway into the Persian Gulf on the Iran-Iraq border...
...I invite all—antitotalitarians and anti-imperialists, liberal hawks and doves, non-experts and specialists, Democrats, neo-cons, and just plain con-cons—to join me in leaving our dead wood there, to reemerge with a kernel of insight: democracy has preconditions...
...I hope they will address how a postwar Democratic administration understood the need to invest resources for democratic success, while Republicans tried to do everything on the cheap, cutting taxes—one must maintain priorities, even in wartime—and trusting the invisible hand in Iraq as at home...
...The will to democracy is only one of democracy's preconditions...
...The "anti-imperialist left," especially those who idolize onetime apologists for Pol Pot like Noam Chomsky, shares a thought with the antitotalitarians: one idea explains all...
...Instead, Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds were there...
...It depends to where, when, and how...
...New Left Review might recall that the Baath's ideological kin in France rallied to Vichy not to the Maquis...
...If circumstances amenable to democracy had existed, it is evident that the Bush administration would have been unable to cultivate them...
...If Japan and Iraq scholars ever pursue this question together, I suspect they will focus on how differences of political cultures, societies, and histories produced varied responses to defeat and to occupation...
...Would democracy probably have ensued...
...Yes, by answering two questions...
...The assumption that they are underlies recent assertions that "Islamo-Fascism" is the "third totalitarianism...
...In any event, one can oppose the West's socioeconomic inequalities, decry its blinkered energy policies, and be disgusted by its past plunder of large parts of the world without conflating "liberation" with effective control of the West's energy supplies—its social and economic life, that is—by religious fanatics and fascist nationalists...
...Totalitarianism versus democracy" made a complex Iraqi reality the function of a simplifying idea...
...These are very different questions...
...Facile imposition of cold war categories distorts our understanding of Mideast difficulties...
...Japan experts within the American elite believed Japanese culture precluded democratization, that it engendered an "obedient herd" of subjects, not citizenship...
...Can democracy be imported successfully...
...American initiatives—ironically, democratic initiatives—were indeed helped along by obedient behavior fostered by cultural attitudes to authority...
...now they function increasingly like langue de bois, as the French call it, wooden language, jargon, substitutes for substance or knowledge, especially local knowledge . . . of Iraq, for instance...
...Later, it joined the ideological arsenal of the cold war, sometimes deployed intelligently, often not...
...Does this sound familiar...
...But consider the conceptual scramble...
...They were wrong...
...Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cannot declare himself above Islamic law and survive as a Shiite extremist...
...It is as unhelpful as "totalitarianism versus democracy" Does oil really explain everything...
...I think there are preconditions, especially of political culture, although every case is distinct...
...Stalin was a totalitarian...
...If we could just blow up the state, that penitentiary of the capitalist present, true humanity would emerge purified for a free future —so thought Mikhail Bakunin, that feral nineteenth-century anarchist...
...Just because bad things share some features doesn't mean that they are essentially alike...
...Dower shows contradictory forces at work in Japan...
...But extremist Islamism DISSENT / Spring 2007 51 is a religious, not a fascist phenomenon...
...It is reckless to wishful-think preconditions away...
...Was there just a fortunate coincidence, an accidental but functional correspondence between nonexpert American idealism and Japanese responses (which were plu50 DISSENT / Spring 2007 ral) to their trauma...
...AlQaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iran's mullahs aim to impose a legal system, Sharia (Islamic law), while an essential feature of fascist regimes (Stalinist too) was the subjugation of legalism...
...Blur these kinds of distinction and you won't see the Mideast on its own grounds...
...Should we generalize about the import and export of democracy after Iraq...
...Some—not all—in the Bush administration believed that the forceful destruction of Iraq's regime would establish instant democracy...
...No, I don't mean that our voices ought not to roar against these bad, brutal things, just that we should stop using these terms...
...Japan experts were pushed aside, and nonspecialists ran the occupation headquarters in Tokyo...
...He assumed "that the four of them together could . . . 'democratize' Japan," and pursued " 'revolution from above' with 'almost messianic' zeal...
...This gives too much weight to political ideas (a common mistake of intellectuals) and masks the production and reproduction of other dimensions of power, ingredients such as authority patterns in political cultures, in this case Russian...
...Bush is no anarchist, even if he thinks "big government" can't do things right (perhaps he is trying to prove this...
...A state, Iraq, was defined as a totalitarian regime in which centralized power permeated all domains of life...
...Then there was to be regime change while maintaining the state...
...Forward to our times: if we could just blow up a frightful totalitarian state, then the unhappy population of Iraq would emerge from the rubble as hearty American-style individualists, inspiring democratic ideals throughout the region...
...The Bush administration not only characterized Saddam's regime as totalitarian, it also described it (rightly) as vicious, ruthless, and brutal...
...Can you skip them in quest of a better world...
...As readers of Edward Said and the London Review of Books already know, the caliphate would have evolved naturally into democracy had the United States and Zionists, who controlled Washington and the media even in the seventh century, not fomented the initial Sunni-Shiite split...
...The Iraq failure is a particular failure...
...Imperialism is blamed for every problem...
...But how can you destroy this totalitarian regime without destroying its state...
...The Baath is an Arab species of fascism...
...And when an old regime, say Saddam's, falls, you may not find a population that was first atomized and then pushed together by totalitarianism, as many theorists of totalitarianism suppose...
...Once they had value...
...It takes form in these questions: Are there preconditions for democracy...
...Otherwise we end up with a wooden stick . . . in our heads...
...THERE IS ANOTHER factor: neoBakuninism in the Bush administration...
...America had "no plan to induce a democratic revolution" in Japan as of early 1945, according to John W. Dower's remarkable study Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II...
...Anti-imperialist" leftists are as much to blame as conservatives for corrupting political discourse when they contend that the "Iraqi Resistance" is of a kind with the French Resistance of the Second World War...
...At the same time, the previous fifteen years of indoctrination dissolved with remarkable speed, showing "the limits of socialization and the fragility of ideology...
...its principal sources are in Iraq and Washington...
...If you listen to some antiwar activists, you would think that "Shaat al-Arab" is what a drawling Texan president wanted to boast after blowing away Saddam with a sixshooter.* Consider this a protest against master categories, a call to disenchant our bitter arguments about the disaster in Iraq...
...Imperialism versus liberation" conflates religious militants and fascist nationalists, and insults real freedom fighters...
...52 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...His only guides, he often intimated, were Washington, Lincoln, and Jesus Christ...
...Contract against the belief that one form of government suits all times and places in all circumstances...
...It's their oil," you say...
...However, Stalinism cannot be explained adequately by pointing only to him, his party, and an attempt to penetrate with ideology every cranny in every mind...
...No, it's the oil of populations who have no say about it...
...Drop the word socialism, sift through the muck, and you will find a rational kernel within the bin...
...America's viceroy, Douglas MacArthur, had "no serious first-hand experience with Japan, apart from war," notes Dower...
...And we will bang our skulls against intransigent realities that just won't do what our sure convictions dictate...
...The concept of totalitarianism emerged in response to fascism and Stalinism and outlined commonalities between them...
...Should Saddam have been ousted by force...
...Dispute over it was central to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s...
...It is resilient...
...It depends to where, when, how, and by whom...
...Were postwar Japan, Germany, or the ex-Soviet bloc relevant examples for Iraq...
...MITCHELL COHEN 1S professor of political science at the Baruch College and Graduate Center of CUNY and co-editor of Dissent...
...Political culture is not genetic or static...
...Saddam and the oil companies could have made a deal in minutes...
...Why were experts largely wrong about Japan, while most experts—I leave aside ideologues and Iraqi exiles—were rightly skeptical about Iraq, where prospects for democrats and a sturdy national state now seem nil...
...It was nonexperts who argued otherwise, such as New Dealers who believed in "the universal applicability of democratic ideals" and leftists who "applauded the revolutionary potential of the lower-class groups that the old Japan hands deemed incapable of democracy...
...Saddam, like Hitler and Stalin, rendered legality meaningless...
...If Osama bin Laden, Sunni extremist, declared Sharia subordinate to his or his movement's will, he would be out of jihadi business...
...Some of the war's planners seem to have been clueless about political geography and political cultures...
...It ought not to be conflated with Islamist extremism...
...Trauma can induce changes, but while an apocalyptic stroke of history may destroy a bad regime, it doesn't ensure that a good one will take its place...
...Right now a variant of the Biden Plan—extensive autonomy for Iraq's three major communities with a central government responsible mainly for borders and distribution of oil revenues —seems the best of many problematic proposals...
...So let's give history a push...
...blow it up and its victims will come through ready to ensure a democratic future that would have come about inevitably, but for the West...
...He read little and "rarely if ever asked his staff questions" about Japan...
...Can you skip them in quest of a better world...
...Can it be exported successfully...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
