[Mb-civic] RECOMMENDED: We Can't Force Democracy - Robert D. Kaplan - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

We Can't Force Democracy
Creating Normality Is the Real Mideast Challenge

By Robert D. Kaplan
Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21

The whiff of incipient anarchy in Iraq in recent days has provided a 
prospect so terrifying as to concentrate the minds of Republicans and 
Democrats, Iraq's sectarian political factions, and even the media. 
Staring over the abyss, only the irresponsible few appear distracted by 
partisan advantage. In that sense alone, the bombing of the golden dome 
in Samarra may serve a useful purpose. For the fundamental nightmare of 
the new century is the breakdown of order, something that the American 
experience offers precious little wisdom in dealing with.

President Bush has posited that the American experience with democracy 
is urgently useful to the wider world. True, but there is another side 
of the coin: that America basically inherited its institutions from the 
Anglo-Saxon tradition and thus its experience over 230 years has been 
about limiting despotic power rather than creating power from scratch. 
Because order is something we've taken for granted, anarchy is not 
something we've feared. But in many parts of the world, the experience 
has been the opposite, and so is the challenge: how to create 
legitimate, functioning institutions in utterly barren landscapes.

"[B]efore the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be 
some coercive power," Thomas Hobbes wrote in "Leviathan." Without 
something or somebody to monopolize the use of force and decide right 
from wrong, no man is safe from another and there can be no freedom for 
anyone. Physical security remains the primary human freedom. And so the 
fact that a state is despotic does not necessarily make it immoral. That 
is the essential fact of the Middle East that those intent on enforcing 
democracy abroad forget.

For the average person who just wants to walk the streets without being 
brutalized or blown up by criminal gangs, a despotic state that can 
protect him is more moral and far more useful than a democratic one that 
cannot. Monarchy was the preferred political ideal for centuries, writes 
the late University of Chicago scholar Marshall Hodgson, precisely 
because the monarch's legitimacy -- coming as it did from God -- was 
seen as so beyond reproach that he could afford to be benevolent, while 
still monopolizing the use of force. To wit, the most moderate and 
enlightened states in the Middle East in recent decades have tended to 
be those ruled by royal families whose longevity has conferred 
legitimacy: Morocco, Jordan, the Gulf emirates and even Egypt, if one 
accepts that Hosni Mubarak is merely the latest in a line of Nasserite 
pharaohs.

Imperfect these rulers clearly are, but to think that who would follow 
them would necessarily be as stable, or as enlightened, is to engage in 
the kind of speculation that leads to irresponsible foreign policy. 
Recall that those who cheered in 1979 at the demise of the shah of Iran 
got something worse in return. The Saudi Arabian royal family may be the 
most reactionary group to run that country, except for any other that 
might replace it. It is unclear what, if anything, besides the monarchy 
could hold such a geographically ill-defined country together.

In the case of Iraq, the state under Saddam Hussein was so cruel and 
oppressive it bore little relationship to all these other dictatorships. 
Because under Hussein anybody could and in fact did disappear in the 
middle of the night and was tortured in the most horrific manner, the 
Baathist state constituted a form of anarchy masquerading as tyranny. 
The decision to remove him was defensible, while not providential. The 
portrait of Iraq that has emerged since his fall reveals him as the 
Hobbesian nemesis who may have kept in check an even greater anarchy 
than the kind that obtained under his rule.

The lesson to take away is that where it involves other despotic regimes 
in the region -- none of which is nearly as despotic as Hussein's -- the 
last thing we should do is actively precipitate their demise. The more 
organically they evolve and dissolve, the less likely it is that blood 
will flow. That goes especially for Syria and Pakistan, both of which 
could be Muslim Yugoslavias in the making, with regionally based ethnic 
groups that have a history of dislike for each other. The 
neoconservative yearning to topple Bashar al-Assad, and the liberal one 
to undermine Pervez Musharraf, are equally adventurous.

Afghanistan falls into none of these categories. We toppled a movement 
in Afghanistan, the Taliban, but we did not topple a state, because none 
had really existed there. Even at the high-water mark of central control 
in Afghanistan in the mid-20th century, the state barely functioned 
beyond the major cities and the ring road connecting them. The governing 
self-sufficiency of Afghan villages has been a factor helping President 
Hamid Karzai establish a legitimate, noncoercive order.

Globalization and other dynamic forces will continue to rid the world of 
dictatorships. Political change is nothing we need to force upon people; 
it's something that will happen anyway. What we have to work toward -- 
for which peoples with historical experiences different from ours will 
be grateful -- is not democracy but normality. Stabilizing newly 
democratic regimes, and easing the development path of undemocratic 
ones, should be the goal for our military and diplomatic establishments. 
The more cautious we are in a world already in the throes of tumultuous 
upheaval, the more we'll achieve.

The writer is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and 
author of "The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101937.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060302/1c36f7e3/attachment.htm