Just when we thought all the foreign-policy nonsense had been stuffed back in the bag—this thing pops out. Apparently, there is no end to the worldly mischief created by the tireless Imps of Idealism and Morality. They never rest, they never sleep. We must always be on the alert for their next noble plan, their latest high-minded proposal.
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 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.”

Like a guilt-ridden, frightened grownup 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.”

Even now, after barely two weeks of war, the chimerical idea that the Iraqis are longing to breathe the free air of democracy is beginning to dissolve. The reports piling in, the pictures on our TV screen, are beginning to reveal a different pattern. It is clear that the non-Arab population in the north—the Kurds and their leaders—are our allies. At least until the war is over. They want Saddam out as much as we do, perhaps more, and they are willing to fight with us to achieve this common aim. And perhaps some but not all of the Shiites in the south are waiting to be freed from Saddam.

But everything else we see and hear suggests that a significant number of Iraqis do not feel oppressed by Saddam, and regard him as their rightful leader. There seems also to be a significant number of Iraqis who are politically unsophisticated and whose children are hungry and who would gladly kiss anyone’s hand that will feed them—George Bush, Saddam Hussein, or Sean Penn. The only Iraqi who appeared unambiguously anti-Saddam was the little chap on the first or second day of ground invasion who hammered away at Saddam’s poster image with his shoe as he grinned for the camera and danced an obsequious little dance in hope of a little baksheesh. We can’t seem to understand why there is still so much resistance to the fulfillment of our dreams—the easy toppling of this evil regime.
The images suggest an alternative view of the situation there.

Perhaps there is no large un-ambivalent Iraqi populace waiting to be freed and turned into liberal democrats. Perhaps this number has been greatly exaggerated by the gurus and is merely wishful thinking in order to fit the rationalization that Iraqis are starving for democracy as well as food.

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—in fact we would go even a little further—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.

ABOUT THE CHANGING OF HEARTS AND MINDS

As some of our readers may know Horsefeathers has 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 and hearts and minds, between us, we know a thing or two. And we 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 (hearts and minds). Fortunately it can be done, but only after years of hard work on the part of a patient and a doctor—and most ordinary people cannot tolerate such frustrating circumstances. So only the most determined, the most unhappy, and those with a considerable amount of inner resources eventually achieve important changes in their lives.

What does all this have to do with post-war Iraq? Well, nation-building, bringing liberal democracy to Iraq requires changing the hearts and minds—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 CBS 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 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 Arabic Islam 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 untempered 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 is the members of Saddam’s extended family and his cronies from Tikrit. In Saudi Arabia, of course, it is the 7000 Saudi Princes.

GRATEFUL? YOU MUST BE JOKING!

The United States is the most generous, magnanimous nation in history. In the twentieth century we paid billions of dollars to support World Wars One and Two. “Give us the tools and we will do the job.” We gave the Brits the tools Winston Churchill asked for, but they couldn’t do the job, not without us. We might easily have hung back in Europe, as many of our military leaders advised, and sent the majority of our resources to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. But our sentimental hearts would not let the gallant Brits fight the war themselves. So we pitched in and lost our blood and treasure—three hundred thousand men and trillions of our hard earned dollars—to save the West Europeans for the second time.

Then in the most selfless national act in the history of Western Civilization we created the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. The U.S. taxpayer—all those cowboys and rednecks, all those simple, tasteless, vulgar guys who won the war for them, reached into their wallets and gave all the countries of Western Europe—friends and enemies alike—money enough to rebuild their homes and industries. Those silly, materialistic Americans couldn’t bear to see German kids eating rat sausage, and the poor Frenchman having to sip chickory coffee in his local café, so they gave the Europeans 12 billion dollars to help them recover. Twelve billion dollars in 1948 dollars is the equivalent of one or two trillion dollars today. That was in addition to the military aid we gave to France and England in order to keep the Red menace from oozing into Western Europe. That was in addition to the cost of keeping an army of American forces in West Germany at the ready to face down the Soviets during the cold war for the past fifty years—until the Soviet threat disappeared.

Back then in 1948 those simple, impulsive cowboys rode to the rescue and saved the two million citizens of West Berlin from having to learn Russian. In response to the Berlin Wall and the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by land and water the United States instituted the Berlin Airlift in June of 1948. We flew food and fuel to the isolated West Berliners until the Russians gave up the blockade in September of 1949. During that period we flew 277,000 flights into Templehof Airport, twenty-four hours a day, sometimes at three-minute intervals, so that our de-nazified brothers could feel warm and cozy and full during that winter.

What have we done for them recently? Well for sixty years Joe Taxpayer has been footing the bill for the defense of Europe. This means that the welfare states of Europe used the money that they would have had to pay for their own defense in order to have free medical care, early retirement, long skiing vacations, short work weeks, and several weeks of annual paid sick leave. Paradise at our expense.

THE HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE

What the history of the twentieth century—the century in which the United States became a super-power among the nations of the world—suggests is that we have been too moral, too magnanimous and, above all, too sentimental about our relations with other nations.

Throughout the last half of the twentieth century the U.S. guided itself by a foreign policy which seemed to serve its purposes. We formed alliances with our “friends,” first to beat the Axis powers and then to win the cold war against Soviet-led communist expansion. In addition to the use of alliances, pacts, and agreements between friendly powers, we came to depend on the use of “personal diplomacy”—the friendships between certain pairs of leaders who seemed to be unusually simpatico with one another. Churchill and Roosevelt had this kind of relationship, and a generation or two later Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher seemed to show this ability to the mutual benefit of both nations.

The arrival of the new millennium has brought with it major changes in the way the world impacts the United States. In the past two years we have been shocked by the open-throated declarations of war against America by millions of Muslims all over the world and, recently, equally shocked to find that nations with whom we have been allied for fifty years—South Korea, France, West Germany and others—refuse to return our favors and give us support when we need it.

Two other important changes have occurred in the last decade. The first is that the central powers of Europe have decided to unite in order to oppose U.S. interests in the world—to become powerful rivals. The second important change is that America won the cold war and has become the world’s most economically successful and militarily powerful nation in history. We are also the world’s oldest and most stable democracy, demonstrating that political and economic freedom work—not perfectly but better than anything else.

Now we must awaken from our romantic foreign policy dreams and face the hard realities of life in the twenty-first century.

The first reality is that nations are not people—they are soulless machines. Nations do not and cannot have relationships like people. We can no longer believe in the fantasy that we have “friends” among nations. We have political and economic interests and those interests will be more or less frustrated by other nations who have different economic and political interests. From time to time one or another nation may aid and abet us in our designs because their interests coincide with ours, but that situation can never last for very long. Neither altruism nor sentimentality can have a place in foreign policy. We may have shared many cakes and much ale with our English-speaking “brothers” but it is clear that the anti-American press and impressive anti-war rallies in Canada and London mean that Tony Blair’s good intentions notwithstanding, he may not be able to deliver on his promises.

The second reality is that we live in a Hobbesian world. Out there life is nasty, brutish, and short. Within our country, and within a handful of other modern countries, life is not perilous and can be lived with considerable freedom to pursue individual happiness, but what goes on outside of these is neither predictable nor safe. The laws and style of the jungle prevail. If you don’t believe me try living or getting around from place to place in the second and third world.

Thus the third reality. There is no meaningful concept of laws or morals between nations. Laws and morals have meaning only within a coherent, enduring social structure. We have our laws and morals in America, and these may be similar (but not identical) to some other western countries, but what about Pakistan, or Tanzania, or Saudi Arabia. You can be sure that the men who attacked us on 9/11 believed that they were doing the right and moral thing. What Hitler did to the Jews was legal in Germany. And the morally superior French passed their own laws enforcing roundups and deportations to “the east.” It is foolish and maladaptive to think about trying to do the right or moral or legal thing in the affairs of nations—there is no such thing. The only rule that one can expect to find operating between nations is the rule of self-interest. As it operates today in the United Nations where an elaborate façade masks the hypocrisy.

The nations of the world may be divided roughly into three groups: those who have overtly and covertly declared war on us and our political and economic interests; those who are not our enemies but who are our rivals and trading partners; and a third group who are weak and underdeveloped. Some of these latter may also be the harborers of our enemies.

With the first group, our enemies, the only aim we can have with such peoples is to destroy and defeat them wherever they may be and if necessary to defeat those nations who support them.

With the second group—our rivals and trading partners—we must learn to play a winning game. It’s poker and business rolled into one. We have to make winning deals but at the same time keep them as good customers—an art best left to poker players and businessmen.

It is important to remember that the underdeveloped and impoverished nations of the world elected to become independent, chose their fate. Before they chose independence many of them were much better off as colonies of developed nations—Sudan, for example . In general the colonies of the British were better off than the colonies of the French, who in turn were better off than the colonies of the Belgians and Dutch.