The Solution: Dictatorship

After supporting the Bush Doctrine to Democratize the Muslims for four years, Ralph Peters looks at the gangland-style Iraqi police forces that we helped create and the near-total anarchy in that country that we have unleashed, and he concludes that the only way to restore order in Iraq may be through direct military rule:

As dearly as we believe in democracy, Iraq’s Arabs are proving that they’re incapable of the political, social and moral maturity necessary to run an elected government.

Casting ballots alone doesn’t make a democracy. The government has to function. And to protect all of its citizens.

In the coming months, we may find that the only hope of restoring order is a military government. It sounds repellent, but a U.S.-backed coup may be the only alternative to endless anarchy.

Arabs still can’t govern themselves democratically. That’s the appalling lesson of our Iraqi experiment. A military regime might be capable of establishing order and protecting the common people.

Well, yes, ORDER must come before there can be GOVERNMENT, and GOVERNMENT must come before there can be DEMOCRATIC government. This kindergarten level of political understanding was evidently inaccessible to our national leadership and their neocon brain trust prior to the invasion of Iraq and has remained inaccessible ever since, so the nation is having to learn the lesson the hard way. In October 2002, I commented on the neocons’ ludicrous idea that because Germany became democratic after World War II, Iraqis could become democratic too:

As a friend put it to me recently, Germans do what they are told and Arabs do not; Germans are governable and Arabs are not—a view supported by the complete absence of consensual government anywhere in the Arab world….

Ideology and a passionate political agenda blinded our leaders to these obvious truths. But Peters, at least, has arrived at the point where our national leadership should have been four years ago. Before we even think about democratizing Iraq, we first have to assure order in Iraq. And Iraq being a violent, religiously divided Muslim country, order requires some kind of authoritarian rule.

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Mark J. writes:

Regarding Peter’s statement that “Arabs still can’t govern themselves democratically”: before we jump to the conclusion that Iraqis are incapable of conducting themselves in a peaceful, law-abiding, democratic manner, I’d suggest we consider the lesson that the Iraqi Kurds are providing. They aren’t much different from the Sunni and Shia groups, at least from our perspective. But the difference here is that they have a clearly defined homeland in northern Iraq exclusively for themselves, and they share it with no other ethnic or religious sect. They protect their border jealously and have wiped out terrorism inside their territory because their citizens can easily spot outsiders, since outsiders look and talk differently.

I think the lesson here has to be that the first requirement for a peaceful nation is that it not be shared by two or more distinct peoples. Beyond that it may indeed be true that even independent Sunni and Shia Iraqi nations would not be capable of conducting their affairs non-violently, but it seems to me that the problem right now is that they have different fundamental values, distrust one another, and are competing for control.

Of course as you point out regularly this should be a lesson to Westerners about what happens when a nation no longer belongs to a single homogenous people.

LA replies:

Interesting point. Do you have a sense of why the Kurds seem to be different? Do they disprove the harsh things we say about Muslims’ capacity for self-government? Or perhaps is the whole Kurdish exceptionalism thing being overstated?

I just don’t know enough about them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 01, 2006 05:20 PM | Send