August 01, 2005

ARAB DEMOCRACY IS STILL THE MOTHER OF ALL OXYMORONS

Winston Churchill once quipped “You can always count on the United States to do the right thing—once it has exhausted the alternatives.”

Now we begin to hear whispers and murmurs from the Pentagon that soon, perhaps as early as next Spring, we will begin standing down in Iraq.
In an article in the New York Times, July 24, 2005, John Burns suggests that a new realism has begun to assert itself among senior leaders in Baghdad and Washington: “The first signs that America's top officials in Iraq were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty after the period of American occupation, the new American team that arrived then, headed by Ambassador John D. Negroponte, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer III.
“The new team called the departing Americans "the illusionists," for their conviction that America could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's medieval brutalism.”

Long before that time Horsefeathers (April 2, 2003) warned that “Arab Democracy” was the mother of all oxymorons. We said at that time:

“Somehow in the months-long struggle that the Bush Government has been carrying on with Old Europe over how to deal with the Iraqis, some of the Administration’s sound and realistic policies have come to be corrupted by the high ideals and chimeric visions of the past. A form of Utopianism is on the loose, a neo-Wilsonian urge to make the world safe for democracy again.

“Early in the formation of Bush’s Iraq policy the aim was simple and militarily achievable—“regime change.” Then came “liberation of the Iraqi people,” and, finally, “the ultimate goal of regime change is liberal democracy.” It does not require the mind of a policy wonk to see that the idea of “liberating” the Iraqi people and transforming them into liberal democrats is a way of sugar coating the naked aggression that is implied in getting rid of the dangerous threat of Saddam. It represents a fear of our own power and of the assertion of our appropriate role of leadership in the world of nation states. Our enemies and rivals call this “unilateralism” or “imperialism.”

“Most opponents of the idea of building a democratic nation in Iraq have also opposed the war to depose and replace Saddam. Horsefeathers does not oppose the war to rid the world of Saddam but only the plan to radically rebuild a nation in our own image that may not want to be changed. There are sound psychological and historical reasons for our view that democratizing Iraq is a fool’s errand.

“Like a guilt-ridden, frightened child who is afraid to assume his rightful responsibility lest his parents—“old Europe”—get angry with him and withdraw their affection and esteem, we make up rationalizations and fantasies that fly in the face of facts and history. So we have to tell ourselves and the hand-wringing appeasers of Europe that the Iraqis are waiting for us to liberate them, that they will dance in the streets when we arrive, that they are lining up to buy copies of the “Federalist Papers.”

ABOUT THE CHANGING OF HEARTS AND MINDS

As some of our readers may know, Steve Rittenberg and I have been practicing and teaching psychiatry and psychoanalysis for a combined total of 75 years. We may not know a whole lot about many things, but about hearts and minds, between us, we know a thing or two. And I can tell you that it’s very, very hard to change hearts and minds. You can change behavior easily enough—all you have to do is put a pistol to somebody’s head and tell them to do what you want, and the chances are they’ll do it. But even with people who are very intelligent and highly motivated to change, it is extremely difficult to change a person’s basic attitudes.

What does all this have to do with post-war Iraq? Well, nation-building, bringing liberal democracy to Iraq, requires changing the attitudes of millions of individuals, most of whom are barely literate, unworldly, uninformed—or worse, misinformed—and happy to have an unskilled job, a roof over their heads and some food on the table. They are not unsatisfied by a life that a CNN journalist, or a Columbia University assistant professor would find boring or degrading—a regular job, a family that’s not starving, and Baghdad TV for a couple of hours every night. The only change they want is more of the same—a little more pay, a little more room, a little more food, a TV that works all the time. They already have a spiritual life—non-secular—that satisfies them. They are not interested in becoming multi-lateral or widening their spiritual horizons. The point is that most Iraqis live simple, unchanging lives and want them to continue that way. This is not to say that they are worse than people in other cultures. On the contrary, they are very much like people the world over. Most people do not want their lives to be transformed. They want to maintain the status quo. In fact people are probably hard-wired for it, the Constancy Principle, some call it. Please, no big changes.

So much for the psychology of it.

IN THE ARAB WORLD TRIBALISM TRUMPS ALL

In the last thirteen hundred years, only one Islamic country has become a working democracy—Turkey. But in all that time there has never been an Arab democracy. And perhaps there never can be. Some would say that Arab ideals and representative democracy are incompatible, that in an Arabic Islamic state authority and religious authority have always gone together.

The majority of Arab states reached independence shortly after the Second World War. For thirty or forty years now the Arab states have been free to make whatever political or social arrangements they choose. Under the cover of some weird conglomeration of nationalism and socialism they all chose autocratic power.

The reason is that the influence of fundamental Islam in the Arab world makes it deeply inhospitable to democratic and liberal principles. While the citizens of longstanding democracies accept a set of basic assumptions—the rule of law, majority rule, equality before the law, the idea of a loyal opposition, the separation of church and state—Arab societies lack such essential democratic concepts and instead vest authority in the word of Mohammed, his interpreters the imams, and the tribal leaders.

The essence of Arab societies is tribal identity, kinship networks, and conceptions of collective honor. These are what organize and regulate the relations of everyday life. In such a context democratic principles are meaningless and incomprehensible. How could a modern democratic bureaucracy function, for example, if officials remain loyal primarily to tribe or family? There can be no such thing as disinterested public service. Public office becomes a means of benefiting your family and harming your enemies, not applying rules fairly.

Modern working democracies developed in different ways. And although they all share the political values mentioned above, their respective governments can be quite varied—the United States, Switzerland, Singapore, the United Kingdom—all democracies and all somewhat different.

One thing that they all share though is a basic requirement of all functioning democracies: a class of people who have a strong devotion to and understanding of its principles—a professional bureaucracy. The more experienced and traditional, the more robust and stable is the government. Iraq has no professional, public-spirited, bureaucratic class, nor has any other Arab nation. What substitutes for one in Iraq are the members of Saddam’s extended family and his cronies from Tikrit. In Saudi Arabia, of course, it is the 7000 Saudi Princes.

And experience with nearly a hundred newly independent countries all of which “intended” to become democratic suggests that only a tiny handful, those largely influenced by Western values—Chile, Poland, Hungary, Taiwan—show any real gains in this direction. The rest, from the Congo to Uzbekistan, suffer from endemic corruption, illegitimate elections and a wide array of political ills that derive from the absence of a modern professional bureaucratic class that values the basic democratic ideas that come only from being trained and educated in Western democracies.

George W. Bush was wrong when he made bringing democracy to Iraq the goal of this war. High–minded and noble maybe, but romantic and unlikely.

History has also taught those who are disposed to listen to it that democracy is extremely difficult to bring about among people. It took most of the countries of Western Europe hundreds of years and countless wars to accomplish modern democracy countless wars—ethnic, religious, and economic wars; revolutions, counter-revolutions, persecutions and civil-wars. Democracies do not get born overnight. And for our leaders to believe that Iraq could develop into a working democracy in the foreseeable future was a lapse in judgment and historical grasp. Tribalism is part of human nature; it took centuries to rise above such human tendencies in Western democracies, and if Iraq lasts that long may take centuries for democracy to work there.

BUT ALREADY WE HAVE WON IN IRAQ

The direct benefit of the Iraqi war has been “a regime change”—the main aim of the Bush government—which, when translated into common language, means that Saddam and his psychotic, unstable sons will not be able to traffic with terrorists. The possibility of causing Middle East mischief in Israel, Iran, or Kuwait through the use of terrorist agencies by providing high grade biological or chemical weapons or dirty radioactive bombs has now been significantly reduced.

The indirect benefits are even greater: Pakistan, which was anti-American for many years is now an ally and has been cooperative in capturing Al Qaeda agents, putting pressure on anti-Western madrassas, and stopping the transfer of nuclear know-how to rogue states; Libya has given up its nuclear program; Syria has withdrawn its armed forces from Lebanon, thus allowing Lebanon to hold freer elections; Egypt is about to hold its first contested election in decades; Saudi Arabia has begun at least paying lip-service to the idea of more open political processes.

Although none of these, individually, may be considered transforming, taken together they suggest a trend that is in the right direction—toward more democratic processes in the Middle East. All from taking an aggressive stance with a dictator who prided himself on possessing one of the most powerful armies in the world.

John Burns closes his NYTimes piece by suggesting a policy change that is close to Horsefeathers’ own: “Some senior officers have said privately that there is a chance that the pullback will be ordered regardless of what is happening in the war, and that the rationale will be that Iraq - its politicians and its warriors - will ultimately have to find ways of overcoming their divides on their own.
“America, these officers seem to be saying, can do only so much, and if Iraqis are hellbent on settling matters violently - at the worst, by civil war - that, in the end, would be their sovereign choice.”

Won’t such a strategy—leaving central and southern Iraq to the Sunnis and Shiites—lead to civil war in Iraq? Very likely. But the fact is that Iraq was never an integrated nation. It was cobbled together by a cadre of French and English bureaucrats after the First World War for their own respective national interests, and to pay off debts in their fragile relationships with the Arabs.

History has shown, again and again, that very often the only way to solve problems between states, nations, peoples, religions, tribes, and all groups of enemies is by war. The polite, highly civilized Western democracies which have a common currency, socialized medicine, and three-week ski vacations didn’t start out that way. From the fall of the Roman Empire in the Fifth Century until 1991—about 1600 years—there were civil wars, and revolutions almost constantly. Even peaceful Switzerland, which hasn’t had a war since 1848, was at war for seven hundred years before the Swiss got tired of fighting. If you let them, these things have a way of working themselves out. It may take a few hundred years but eventually they do reach an equilibrium.

Our regular armed forces have no place in the middle of a political/guerrilla war. They have done their part and now it’s up to the Iraqis to fight it out amongst themselves—which is part of the process of historical change.