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Why are we celebrating the Iraqi elections?
For the third time in a year, Iraq has had an election, and for the third time in a year, President Bush’s supporters are joyous, ecstatic, happy, fulfilled, high-fiving, jumping up and down. They’re announcing that this miraculous event proves that the president’s policy has been on course all along, that all the critics have been blowing hot air, and that Iraq is a success, and that all we have to do is believe. But the real views and motives of the celebrators were perhaps unintentionally revealed by Jim Geraghty at National Review Online:
A JOYOUS DAY NEAR THE END OF A PEEVISH YEAR [12/16 05:08 AM]Oh, I see. Things in Iraq haven’t been going so well at all, have they, and this election is really just a momentary exception from the steady drumbeat of bad news, a moment when we can imagine that there is not an ongoing terror insurgency that we have no ability to end and no strategy to end, when we can imagine that U.S. troops are not the absolutely indispensable element in that country holding it from chaos, when we can imagine that the Iraqis are managing their own government, and when we can imagine that an election in an Arab country, or two elections, or three elections, has any enduring meaning. In other words, the election’s real significance, as far as pro-Bush journalists such as Geraghty are concerned, is as a relief, a pick-me-up, a few stiff drinks at the corner pub to lift the depression brought on by the actual disaster of our Iraq involvement. Here I will repeat for the nth time that I never had any doubts that there would be elections in Iraq and thatg a government would be formed, but that I didn’t think that elections and the forming of a government meant that much, because as long as the insurgency was not defeated and we had no way or will to defeat it, any successes of an Iraqi “democracy” were chimerical. I’ve also said that even if Iraqi democracy and self-government were successful, it would most likely lead to the ascendancy of forces unfriendly to us, or, alternatively, encourage us to embark on similar interventions in other countries, sparking endless terror war by jihadists throughout the Muslim world, which would, among other undesirable results, render any stable democracy impossible. Such prospects take us farther and farther afield from the only reasonable and legitimate purpose of the war, which is to make ourselves safe from Muslim terrorism and other jihadist aggression. President Bush has repeatedly told us how such safety is to be achieved. Democracy, he says, will end terrorism. According to this democratist logic, we would need to believe the following in order to justify the present joy over the Iraqi elections: that Iraqi self-government will take root, and that this in turn will lead more or less spontaneously to the democratization of other Muslim countries, and that this in turn will lead to the waning of jihadism and terrorism throughout the Muslim world, and that this in turn will lead to the waning of jihadism and terrorism in the Western world as well. That last step was added to the global democratist logic as a result of the suicide bombings in London last summer. When it was pointed out that the bombings, committed by British-born Muslims of Pakistani origin, showed that living in a democracy does not necessarily prevent people from becoming terrorists, Bush supporters replied that as long as there was jihadist terrorism going on in the Mideast, it would influence Muslims living in the West. The implication was that in order for Western countries to be safe from domestic terror attacks by their own Muslim citizens, the entire Muslim world would have to be democratized. Once again, here are the four goals, each supposedly leading to the next, that constitute Bush’s policy: the successful democratization of Iraq, leading to the democratization of the rest of the Muslim countries, leading to the disappearance of jihadism in the Muslim world, leading to the disappearance of jihadism in the Western world. Now, if we don’t believe that all four of those goals are likely to be achieved (and it seems to me it would be pretty hard for a serious person to believe that even the first goal is reasonably likely to be achieved, let alone all four of them), then what are we doing in Iraq? Of course, President Bush has recently been pushing a much less ambitious, and far more defensive, reason for our being in Iraq. He says we must stay and win, or Al Qaeda will gain control of the country. While this is certainly something to be avoided, we all seem to have forgotten that prior to the U.S. invasion, the possibility that Al Qaeda might take over Iraq was not in the farthest reach of anyone’s imagination. So how did this awful threat come into being? It came into being because President Bush and his war planners were convinced that the Iraqi people were so ready and eager for democracy that as soon as the Hussein regime had been removed the Iraqis would set up their own, democratic government. Therefore Bush and his team didn’t bother mustering the necessary forces to destroy all the fighting elements of the Hussein regime and take effective control of the country. The result of this “liberation, not an occupation” was a post-war Iraq without anyone in charge, an Iraq in chaos, into which Al Qaeda was able to enter, something it never could have done while Hussein was in power. Due, then, to the neoconservative democratist fantasies of our leaders, the purpose of the Iraq war got changed from the aggressive and achievable purpose of removing the Hussein regime and its weapons of mass destruction, to the defensive and unachievable purpose (unachievable short of our keeping our forces in Iraq forever) of preventing an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq, even as the prospect of a self-sufficient successor government—that is, of a government not dependent on the presence of U.S. forces for its very existence and survival—faded into the mist. Has such a catastrophic reversal ever occurred in the annals of war? Bush has been getting credit lately for admitting to making some mistakes in Iraq. Has he admitted to creating such chaos in Iraq through his naive belief in democracy, that we must now stay in the country forever to prevent it from being taken over by an enemy who was not even in the country when the war began? And should we respect the Bush supporters’ cheers for the “successful” elections that, in a continuation of the same democratist fantasy that allowed Al Qaeda to come into Iraq, they now profess to see as the sure sign that we are defeating Al Qaeda? But there is a very different way of understanding what we are up to in Iraq. Maybe (as a Bush supporter suggested to me recently) the Bush team was never really serious about democracy in the first place. Maybe their democratization effort in Iraq is really just a cover to help the U.S. establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, from which we would have the ability to deter or attack threatening regimes such as Iran. Now I myself favor a permanent U.S. base in the region, for just that purpose. But having a permanent U.S. base in the region is more in the nature of a grim necessity than an occasion for us to be dancing in the streets, is it not? Further, if establishing a base was the real purpose of our presence in Iraq all along, shouldn’t the American people have been told this? And if this has been concealed from us, presumably because we can’t handle the truth and have to be given pretty lies about democracy, in short, if the whole Iraq democratization adventure has been a huge subterfuge and conning of the American people, is that an occasion for huzzas by conservative American journalists? To summarize, if the purpose of the elections is to set up a democratic government capable of defending itself and thus allow us to leave Iraq, there’s no reasonable prospect of that happening, and therefore no cause for celebrating the elections. If the purpose of the elections is to defeat Al Qaeda and drain the poison of jihadist extremism from both the Mideast and the West, there’s no reasonable prospect of that happening, at least as a result of the elections, and therefore no cause for celebrating the elections. And if the elections are only a cynical cover for the establishment of U.S. power in the region, that is also no cause for celebration. Why, then, are the Bush supporters celebrating? I suggested at the beginning that the Bush supporters simply need something positive to point to in the midst of so much bad news. But why, given all the problems pointed to above, do they see the elections as such an extraordinarily positive thing, indeed, as the very index of victory? The answer is that they have made the shadows and symbols of democracy in a foreign land more important than the concrete interests of the United States, or, rather, they have equated such shadows with America’s concrete interests. It is—as I have said many times—the first neoconservative war.
A couple of readers disagree with my idea that Iraq is the first neoconservative war. One reader says:
You write that Iraq is the first Neocon war. But what about the 1999 bombing of Serbia/Kosovo in the name of “diversity”?Another reader says:
There was a prelude to the war in Iraq—it was Bill Clinton’s war against our friends, the Serbs, which “freed” the Muslims to destroy the Orthodox Christian civilization. An article in French at Occidentalis.com led me to the English version of the article, complete with photos (before and after) of the destruction of churches and monasteries.I replied to both readers:
I totally opposed our intrusion in Serbia (although, after the mass expulsion of the Kosovars had occurred, as a response to our bombing of the Serbs, continued bombing by the U.S. became necessary in order to force the Serbs to allow the Kosovars back to their country). And it is true that the neocons and Republicans supported Clinton in this war. But the logic for the war was not neocon-style global democratism, it was liberal-style global multiculturalism. As Gen. Wesley Clark chillingly said at the time, we were moving into a future in which all countries in Europe must be pluralistic and diverse, and we were going to enforce that. Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 18, 2005 12:00 AM | Send Email entry |