Was Promoting Democracy a Mistake?

 Liberalism, the Arab Spring, and the mugging of neoconservatives

By John Agresto    COMMENTARY, December 2012

JOHN AGRESTO served as senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in the year following the liberation of Iraq. He has subsequently been a founding member of the board of trustees, provost, acting chancellor, and dean of the faculty at the American University of Iraq, in Kurdish Iraq. His book :

“Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions” (Encounter) contains the beginnings of this analysis.

AS SECTARIAN VIOLENCE in the Middle East increases, as Iraq falls further into the orbit of Iran, as Afghanistan seems poised to hand over its corrupt democracy to terrorists and Taliban murder­ers, and as American interests and lives are sacrificed to the depredations of the so­ called Arab Spring, it might be worthwhile to take stock of what these unfolding debacles mean for neoconser­vatives and our attachment to democracy's expansion.

We should begin with Iraq, where our most re­cent foray into democratic nation-building began.

I was, from the start of the campaign to liber­ate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, both a supporter of our efforts there and an actor on the ground. I first went to Iraq in the summer of 2003 as a civilian work­ing for the Pentagon and was in Iraq for the better part of the last decade, having finally left at the end of 2010. I was certain, from the first day of Shock and Awe, that the war was good and that our planting the seeds of democratic rule in that part of the world was very good.

Because I tended to believe that all people yearn for freedom and deserve to govern themselves, I thought that what we were attempting was good for Iraq and all Iraqis. Moreover, because I looked forward to seeing a democratic nation rise out of the ruins of a Ba'athist tyranny, I thought we were surely raising up a future international friend, perhaps even an ally for America. And, since I knew that liberal democracies rarely war against other liberal states, I had hopes that a friendly, freedom-loving democracy would be good for peace in a region that had not seen much peace.

Yet it soon became apparent that the chasm be­tween our expectations and the political reality was dai­ly growing wider. We were, to be sure, steadily advanc­ing some type of democracy in Iraq. There were parties and elections and the writing of a constitution. But the peace, the toleration, the personal liberties, the modera­tion of violent passions we hoped would follow in the wake of democracy's advent were almost nowhere in evidence. Something clearly was going wrong.

This was brought home to me not long after I first went to Iraq, when I met a number of Iraqi par­liamentarians charged with put­ting together their new constitu­tion. We spent three intensive days talking about representa­tion, taxation, federalism, rights, religious freedom-the whole range of issues we all knew the new Iraq would need to address. At one point I said something I took to be obvious-that the rea­son to take such pains in writing the new constitution was to assure that Iraq would have a good democracy and not a bad one.

One of the Iraqi participants looked at me as if I had just uttered something not only mistaken but astounding. He raised his hand and said he didn't­ couldn't-believe what he had just heard. How could there be such a thing as a bad democracy? Wasn't America always telling everyone how good democracy was? Wasn't that the reason the Iraqis were there-to get rid of their old ways and usher in democracy?

Given the level of discourse of almost all Ameri­cans with political authority whom I knew, he was right to be taken aback. What then was general American excitement regarding the possibilities of a democratic Iraq-which would beget an even wider enthusiasm over the Arab Spring-would surely have led anyone to think that increasing the number of democracies world­wide was a pillar of American foreign policy and in itself most desirable. What was begun in good measure by neoconservative theorists and promoted by the Bush ad­ministration later became the cornerstone of American foreign policy under the next administration. Th both of them, conservative and liberal, the promotion of de­mocracy worldwide seemed indeed a very good thing.

How different this optimism is from the state of affairs just a few decades before, when more sober views prevailed and nearly everyone understood that there were good democracies and bad democracies. Once, every schoolchild knew that our democratic revolution, which culminated in national indepen­dence and our democratic Constitution, was good­ and that the highly democratic French Revolution, which culminated in the Terror and the guillotine, was bad. But today there are those who cheer every movement abroad toward democratization without thinking whether the democracy being created is lib­eral or repressive, moderate or fanatical, good or bad:

So what led me to rethink the view that the com­ing of democracy to Iraq, and subsequently to the whole Middle East and beyond, would be a very good thing? First, the clear-sightedness of many of the Iraqis I worked with in Baghdad, especially those who were secular Muslims or belonged to religious or ethnic mi­norities. Unlike we Americans, they knew that democ­racy is simply another form of arranging power. They understood the obvious: Democracy is a means, some­times a good means and sometimes a bad means, to reach the real goals of political life, peace, prosperity, justice, liberty, and security.

But, we Americans insisted, those things would all follow in democracy's wake. It was through de­mocracy that the good results of political life would become real. We seemed convinced of two things: First, that democracy is the form of government under which all men are meant to live, and that democracy, unlike autocracy of any kind, is just in itself. Being just, it includes in its very essence the ideas of freedom, equality, protection of rights, and toleration. Democra­cy is natural, democracy is how men achieve just politi­cal life, and, most surely, democracy means freedom.

Second, we constantly gave the impression that democratic government, being natural, is easy. Throw off the tyrant, overturn the ruling class, write a consti­tution, hold elections, and voila- Democracy.

In all this, we betrayed an understanding that was alien to our own country's democratic beginnings as well as removed from any reading of history, ancient or modem. To be seduced by the rising tide of democ­racy worldwide, one had to block from view the demo­cratic election in Gaza, where a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of its sovereign neighbor won the day. One had to forget that a quasi-military rule in Pakistan was overthrown and that the new and more democratic government now plays the role of double agent in the war on terrorism while working to further destabilize an already unstable Afghanistan.

One had to forget that in a more democratic Afghanistan, not one Christian institution-church, charitable organization, school-remains and "apostasy" is truly punishable by death. Perhaps one might want to look at the demo­cratic mobs in Libya executing all blacks they capture, both men and women; or the mobs in Egypt burning Coptic churches or rallying almost daily for the destruc­tion of Israel. And all this before the latest attacks on American consulates and embassies and the taking of American lives.

So WHAT went wrong?

How could so many thoughtful and politically savvy Americans­ including so many of my neoconservative com­rades -hold a view whose consequences seem so not conducive to freedom, to security, or to peace? How could so many otherwise careful  readers of history, students of Lincoln, Tocqueville, and devotees of the thought of the American Founders-who were nothing it not careful about remedying the serious shortcomings of democratic rule -be so blasé about spreading democracy wherever?

Let me begin somewhat superficially: I think, first, that our understanding of government was de­fective. Perhaps because of the success we have had in America with democracy, we now imagine that demo­cratic government doesn't have to be crafted, but can merely be willed into being.

But what we are learning the hard way in the Mid­dle East is that there is little in politics harder to create than a just and stable democracy. Nothing takes more art, more human effort, and more intelligence to design than a good democracy. Autocracy is easy; role by ty­rants or elders or mobs is easy. But a liberal and just democracy is hard to make and even harder to maintain.

What else about government did we fail to un­derstand? Well, the most obvious mistake was to make 50 easy an elision, 50 easy an identification, between democracy and freedom. I wrote above that the flour­ishing of liberal democracies worldwide was good for both our own security and the safety of free countries everywhere. But the operative term is ''liberal democracies” not simply "democracies."

There is little else clearer in today's politics than the fact that what we have encouraged, supported, and even fought and died for in the Middle East are not liberal democracies. Women, secularists, and Chris­tians are increasingly harassed, and even within the predominant regional culture itself we see smaller Islamic, tribal, and ethnic minorities persecuted every day. Our notion that the overthrow of autocracy and the coming of democracy meant also the coming of freedom was simply wrong. 

Yes, we neoconservatives could point to the lib­eration of Eastern Europe from Soviet hegemony, or liberal democracy-building in Germany and Japan after World War II, or even the wonderful success of the civil rights movement here in America to prove that all peoples wish to live in freedom. Yet those examples seem not to carry us to the facts that we see around us today.

But why? "Don't all people yearn for freedom?" we have asked. And we assume the answer is yes. But the answer is no. Some people, perhaps most people, prefer oth­er goods. Indeed, some people would rather be holy than free, or safe than free, or be instructed in how they should lead their lives rather than be free. Many prefer the comfort of strong answers already given rather than the openness and hazards of free­dom. There are those who would never dream of substituting their will for the imam's or pushing their desires over the customs and traditions of their families. Some men kiss their chains.

As good Americans, we may wish to say that all people deserve freedom. But to say that all people de­sire it is fiat-out wrong.

Nevertheless, to ask "Don't all men want to be free?" is to ask exactly the wrong question. The right question is "Do you want your neighbors to be free?" Ii the answer is "My neighbor worships false gods" or ''My neighbor's tribe is full of thieves and assassins and needs to be exterminated" or ''My neighbor's views will lead this nation to eternal damnation” then you can be certain that the raw material upon which a truly free and liberal democracy is to be built is not there.

Democracy, we need to understand, is rule by the people. Democracy more than any other government takes on the character of its people. But if the people are intolerant or rabidly sectarian, if they are accustomed to being told how to live instead of making their own futures, if  they see all human exchanges as zero-sum games, with every neighbor's success a subtraction from their own -or if there's no patriotism, no real love of neighbor, no willingness to compromise-then it is close to impossible for liberal democracy to take root among that people.

So far this essay has been a meditation on two problems we have faced in trying to spread liberal democracy abroad. The first is political: We have understood, ever since the Founding, that the protection and growth of liberty require certain institutions, certain political arrange­ments. We are attached to a checked and balanced government, an independent judiciary, a written Con­stitution with an enforceable Bill of Rights, calendared elections, federalism, local government, vibrant civic institutions, and above all the separation of church and state not only because they are ours but because, through their efficacy, we have enabled decent and free government to flourish. Are all these same institutions necessary everywhere? Of course not. But some way of politically moderating and checking excessive major­ity power is vital if democracy is to have any hop e of being temperate, tolerant, and just.

Beside institutions, the most important political ingredient in democratic freedom, as James Madison so carefully argued, is pluralism. If the nation is a di­vided rather than a pluralistic nation, liberal democra­cy will fail. It doesn't matter if the division is between a few rich and the many poor, or between Catholics and Protestants, or between farmers and ranchers, or between believers and infidels. Wherever there is a majority side with passionate interests and a smaller minority side, the minority will consistently lose: Sad­ly, in the various “Arab Spring" nations, divisions are everywhere, and pluralism is all too rare.

But if half the problem is political, the other, and far more bedeviling, half is cultural. We political scien­tists have something of a professional fiction. We think that the type of government people live under shapes their culture. Indeed, we believe that political life shapes human character. So, we think that aristocra­cies produce people with aristocratic desires, that tyr­annies produce a culture of fear and dependency with slavish or vicious subjects, and that democracies pro­duce people who are peaceful, and understanding of difference. But this might simply be backwards.

I was always struck by Alexis de Tocqueville's comment that Americans were on the way to being a democratic peo­ple long before establishing a democratic government. We served on colonial juries where we listened to both sides before we rendered judgment on our fellow citi­zens. We had professional, civic, and social institutions that taught us how to work together. We fought the Revolutionary War against the British Crown, a war in which perhaps a third of our citizens were on the British side and yet after the war there were no show trials, no recriminations, no mass graves. To do it the other way around-to begin with a democratic govern­ment and hope for a people with a democratic outlook and habits to grow as a result - is more often than not a fool's errand.

The left, which speaks often about the impor­tance of diversity, multiculturalism, and culture, should understand this matter better than the right does. Yet, while liberals may claim to see the formative nature of culture, they rarely go beyond superficiali­ties. Sometimes the remnants of a lazy Marxism take over, giving the left the handy but false excuse that poverty, joblessness, or capitalist exploitation cause tumult and war. The left, it seems, would rather have us celebrate other cultures than understand them, for understanding them might lead us to judging, or even opposing, them. Above all, despite their attachment to the virtues of multiculturalism, rarely will the left admit that culture-especially religious culture­ shapes a nation and shapes a people's character.

Yet it is the character of a culture that shapes the aspirations of its citizens and the nature of its democ­racy. A culture in which there is little religious or intel­lectual freedom, where adherence to the commands of imams or religious scholars is sacrosanct, a culture that believes its duty before God is to punish dissent, kill apostates, and exterminate God's supposed ene­mies, a culture in which there is no deep acceptance of difference -such cultures will produce illiberal souls who are hardly strong candidates to form a truly lib­eral and free democracy.

Nor is the right without fault in this matter. Neo­conservatives especially, with their insistence on the universality of human nature and human desires and the secondary character of culture, fail to see the true centrality of culture in shaping human life. All too of­ten we rail against multiculturalism and proclaim that the important thing to know is that all men share a common human nature. We are the first to proclaim that just as fire bums in Hellas as it does in Persia, so is it true that human beings are the same, deep down, the world over.

But culture and custom are, as Pascal wrote in Pensées, "a second nature." Culture is not just some­thing that affects how we dress and what we eat and how we look at the world. It is something with the force of human nature itself. Culture-especially, to­day, religious culture- determines a people's outlook and aspirations, what it holds to be just and what it holds to be dishonorable.

While conservatives may be correct in saying that justice and rights are universal and that good and evil are independent of historical circumstance or of any person's cultural outlook, the fact remains that what a person believes is just and unjust-and what leads him to act is always shaped more by his culture than by the truth objectively understood. That is, while the love of justice might be natural to all humanity, the content and meaning of that justice is far more often decided by custom and culture than by argument and philoso­phy. What people know, and what they act on, is what their culture-again, especially their religious culture ­tells them is good or evil, noble or shameful. How is it that we Americans always seem to confuse what we've learned through our religions, our history, and our mor­al stories with universal human commands?

The simple fact is that freedom and democracy have political, social, and cultural preconditions, and there are some nations, many nations, where the pre­conditions for just and free democratic role are absent.

How sanguine should we be about the pros­pects for liberal democracies in the world? If history is any guide, what will ultimately happen is that the tumultuousness of the Arab Spring will probably not lead to a calm or steady growth of democratic life but will make life messier. The parti­sans of the old regime, the military, the secularists and liberals, and some religious and tribal minorities will continue to clash with Islamists of different stripes and with whatever the predominant ethnic or tribal group turns out to be. What was intended to bring or­der and stability to the region will bring about exactly the opposite: a mix of instability and repression.

But politics abhors instability. Anarchy, chaos, is never a lasting order. Soon new orders will arise, but they will not be democratic. For all our giddiness over the Arab Spring, we will soon see these nations (includ­ing, sadly, Iraq and especially Afghanistan) turn back to where they began: repressive role by strongmen or par­ty or religious despots. The only difference is that America will have lost whatever allies she may have had under formerly tyran­nical regimes, harmed a number of our short-range national inter­ests, and perhaps even done per­manent damage to our few true allies in the region.

But not all is irretriev­ably lost Nations and people do change. Religious toleration was not always the hallmark of the West. It grew out of the unmitigated horrors of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries coupled with the growth of commerce and the development of liberal and tolerant philosophy. We have even seen in the last century nominally Islamic strongmen promote the education and liberation of women, protect religious mi­norities, and work to secularize everyday life. Culture is ferociously powerful, but it can change.

Sadly, trying to promote democracy in a nation that is strongly sectarian, intolerant of difference, and skeptical of the equality that gives dignity and freedom to all might do more to hinder than advance democracy.

Should America continue its attempt to spread democracy abroad? Only in the most limited of cir­cumstances, and only when we stop reflexively think­ing that every mob that pits itself against autocratic rulers is made of ''heroes and patriots." Do the people we would aid appreciate freedom, and would they be ready to fight for it? More important, are they ready to fight for the freedom of their fellow citizens and be able to live and work with them? Are they willing to live under a government and under a rule of law that empowers and restrains the democratic majority? Are they, moreover, eager to live in peace with their foreign neighbors? If the answer to all those questions is yes, then and only then might it be worth our blood and treasure to help.

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Artykuł zbyt chyba szczery na gusta redaktorów COMMENTARY, bo dali odpowiedź:

[ A Response by Abe Greenwald]

...Ale nie warta przytoczenia. Sam artykuł zaś - zadziwiająco szczery, pokazuje, jak myślą niektórzy spośród neocons.