Exporting Democracy: What Have We Learned from Iraq?
Cushman, Thomas
AS SOMEONE who supported the war in Iraq, I am often asked these days—in some cases tauntingly and with a touch of Schadenfreude—if I have changed my mind. Even when asked politely, the question...
...They fall flat among those on the left who willfully ignored any and all good news coming out of Iraq for several years before things took a turn for the worse in the last year...
...The war has now been labeled by left-liberal political elites and the intelligentsia as a "failure...
...Kant argued that war, bad as it was, could often lead to positive outcomes in terms of facilitating future peace...
...There is nothing new in this rhetoric...
...wHAT MIGHT a liberal defender of the war say to critics at the present moment...
...That escaping from it is a virtue is arguable...
...Such arguments fall flat among those on the left who never showed solidarity with the Iraqis during the early days of the war and who refused to listen to them when a substantial majority indicated that they supported the coalition war to depose Saddam and create a democratic Iraq...
...The outstanding achievements of Iraqi Kurdistan...
...The UN is an undemocratic and illiberal organization that would have been considered an abomination by the liberal republican Immanuel Kant...
...This is not to denigrate those who have made the decision to oppose the war...
...Yet democratization does not have a bright future either if it relies on the very institutions that give tyrants like Saddam distinct advantages and allow gross violators of human rights to colonize the structures of global governance...
...Silence...
...The rise of the labor movement from virtually nothing to almost one million members today...
...Even when asked politely, the question is vexing and, in any case, my opinion is of little consequence in relation to the tragic turn of events in Iraqi history...
...The hardest observation to make is that either a DISSENT / Spring 2007 53 retreat from democratization or an effort to salvage it will produce further loss of life...
...Silence...
...THESE SILENCES were accompanied by a constant focus on the intransigencies of the Coalition forces, the demonization of the United States and George W. Bush (perhaps deserved, but with a life all its own), and odd declamations by leftists who harped for years on the dangers of orientalism about how "they" (the Iraqis) are not "ready" for democracy...
...The last thing—the very last thing—you would say to them is that on March 1, 2008, we will surrender to the enemies that are butchering you now and who are emboldened by the arguments of defeatists in the U.S...
...54 DISSENT / Spring 2007...
...International law, and particularly the law that protects rulers like Saddam, is manipulated by tyrants to foster their murderous agendas, while restraining the power of liberal states to intervene against them...
...It still matters to millions of liberalminded Iraqis who threw their energies into building a democratic and free society, but who have been thwarted by the abject failures of the Bush administration, the willful indifference and even hostility displayed by the global left, and the barbaric fundamentalist and fascist terrorists who use indiscriminate mass murder as their weapon of choice...
...change entails almost intolerable losses and risks—especially intolerable in democratic societies that have low thresholds for such things...
...The more general question of this symposium is, what does Iraq indicate about the future of democratization...
...Congress and by candidates for president...
...But if, perhaps, it is foolish to believe that something called democracy can emerge from the current wreckage, it is most certainly the case that something quite the opposite of democracy will be established in Iraq if the Democrats have their way...
...power...
...No matter where one turns in so-called liberal arguments there are illiberal dead ends...
...The call for surrender in the war—and let us call it what it is—is made without any consideration of the consequences of withdrawal for the substantial number of liberal people and movements in Iraq, to say nothing of how al-Qaeda will be emboldened to strike us again at a time and place of its choosing...
...As in other epochs, it indicates that battles against tyrannies have a high price...
...A Kantian hope, then, is that the tragedy of the Iraq War might lead to the formation of authentic liberal alliances to resist tyrants and foster democratization and the advancement of human rights...
...They may, in fact, be guilty of everything their detractors say about them, but the latter are in no way the superior moral force, despite their pious tones...
...That Iraq is a tragedy is inescapable...
...THOMAS CUSHMAN is a professor of sociology at Wellesley College...
...Throughout the war, the liberal case for it mattered little to those in power in the United States or to those who were critical of U.S...
...My answers are simple and even plaintive: if you stood in solidarity with the Iraqi people enough to support them in their decades of struggle against Saddam's terror, if you bore witness to and championed them in the heady days of their free and democratic elections, if you affirmed the efforts of the Iraqi labor movement and women's rights organizations, and now things are taking a turn for the worse, you ought to redouble your effort to stand in solidarity with them...
...They have made mistakes and will be held to account in the historical record...
...It is to alert them to the fact that the American president and his left-wing ally Tony Blair really are a force for liberal internationalist solidarity...
...There are, of course, good-faith, wellgrounded criticisms of the war, and perhaps we have reached a position of what might be called ontological failure...
...Stability can be maintained at the cost of tolerating and "containing" human rights abusers...
...It failed yesterday, it's failing today, and it will fail tomorrow...
...Silence...
...Yet, as the Kurds, who have paid with their blood for their new Kurdistan, often say, "Freedom is not free...
...One thing for certain is that war is not the best way to achieve democratization, although this does not mean that no value has come of this war (the deposition of Saddam, for instance, and the possibility of democracy...
...ALL THIS ADDS UP to the fact that there has been little that can be considered "liberal" in the dominant positions of the left regarding the war...
...Critics of the war now would like us to believe that the war is over, that we have lost, that any further presence in Iraq is a waste of blood and treasure...
...In any case, the use of force should not be ruled out a priori because the Iraq War has been so problematic...
...An Iraqi Parliament 30 percent of whose members are women (almost twice the paltry 17 percent in the United States...
...Pressure from within the Bush administration to meet those obligations was met with active resistance, especially from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld...
...It mattered most to those powerless agents in Iraq who mostly did support the war and did see it as an act of liberation...
...In terms of fulfilling the basic obligations of a liberal state toward a conquered rogue state, the war was a disaster...
...Perhaps the best hope for democratization would be for liberal states to develop alternative multilateral alliances that would exemplify John Rawls's Law of Peoples, possess the means and will to use force against rogue states and, most important, work together (outside the UN if necessary, as in the case of Kosovo) to fulfill the liberal duty of social reconstruction...
...Free elections in which seven million Iraqis voted for the first time...
...It has been evident throughout the war and had a life of its own, ignoring evidence when things were going well and amplifying evidence when things went badly in order to fulfill leftist prophecies of doom...
...Silence...
...Where is Kurdistan, anyway...
...Representative Peter Welch (D-VT) recently trumpeted the central belief of the Democrats: "The administration's policy on Iraq has failed...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
