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Lessons from
history: these two in full by Will and Kaplan top the most viewed list at
Washington Post this morning, not surprisingly. It’s beyond tragic in the Greek
sense that these lessons were ignored by those who considered themselves so
learned and above reproach. But First,
two other relevant commentaries by well-known neoconservatives in contrition. kwc Wm. F. Buckley It didn’t work
http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200602241451.asp Jacob Weisberg reviews Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads: “While he remains sympathetic to the
democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and
militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as "preventive war,"
"benevolent hegemony," and "regime change." Neoconservatives,
he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that
ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure,
and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social
engineering," Fukuyama writes "… is the most enduring thread running
through the movement." Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an
attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply
alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray—and
lead the country—so far off course? Though Fukuyama
does not make this comparison, their failure looks increasingly like that of
the architects of the Vietnam War, chronicled by David Halberstam in The
Best and the Brightest. …In Greek tragedy,
the hero's fall is often charted in terms of his hamartia, sometimes translated as "tragic flaw."
What undid the neoconservatives in the end may have been an instinct left over
from their old Trotskyist days, a weakness for categorical Marxist-Hegelian
thinking (a pretty good _expression_ of which, come to think of it, is Fukuyama's
own most famous work, The End of History and the Last Man). People who should have known better came
to believe that one place was like another, and that historic inevitability
would do the heavy lifting for them. Now the neoconservative tragedy is ours as
well.” http://www.slate.com/id/2137208?nav=wp Rhetoric of Unreality By George F. Will,
Washington Post, Thursday, March 2, 2006; A21 When late in the
spring of 1940 people of southeastern England flocked across the Channel in
their pleasure craft and fishing boats to evacuate soldiers trapped on Dunkirk
beaches, euphoria swept Britain. So Prime Minister Winston Churchill sternly
told the nation: "We must be very careful not to assign to this
deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations." Or by curfews, such as
the one that cooled the furies that engulfed Iraq after the bombing last week
of a Shiite shrine. Wars are not won simply by facing facts, but facing them is
a necessary prerequisite. Last week, in the
latest iteration of a familiar speech (the enemy is "brutal,"
"we're on the offensive," "freedom is on the march") that
should be retired, the president said, "This is a moment of choosing for
the Iraqi people." Meaning what? Who is to choose, and by what mechanism?
Most Iraqis already "chose" -- meaning prefer -- peace. But in 1917
there were only a few thousand Bolsheviks among 150 million Russians -- and the
Bolsheviks succeeded in hijacking the country for seven decades. After Iraqis voted in
December for sectarian politics, an observer said Iraq had conducted not an
election but a census. Now America's heroic ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, one
of two indispensable men in Iraq, has warned the Iraqi political class that
unless the defense and interior ministries are nonsectarian, meaning not run as
instruments of the Shiites, the United States will have to reconsider its
support for Iraq's military and police. But that threat is not credible: U.S.
strategy in Iraq by now involves little more than making the Iraqi military and
police competent. As the president said last week: "Our strategy in Iraq
is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down." Iraq's prime minister
responded to Khalilzad's warning by accusing him of interfering in Iraq's
"internal affairs." Think about that, and about the distinction drawn
by the U.S. official in Iraq who, evidently looking on what he considers the
bright side, told Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, "This isn't a war. It's
violent nation-building." Almost three years
after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is
a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on its constitution, Iraq
barely has a government. A defining attribute of a government is that it has a
monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. That attribute is incompatible
with the existence of private militias of the sort that maraud in Iraq. Michael Rubin of the
American Enterprise Institute, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports that
Shiite militias "have broken up coed picnics, executed barbers [for the
sin of shaving beards] and liquor store owners, instituted their own courts,
and posted religious guards in front of girls' schools to ensure Iranian-style
dress." Iraq's other indispensable man, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, says
that unless the government can protect religious sites, "the believers
will." When violence surges,
if U.S. forces take the lead in suppressing it they delay the day when Iraqi
forces will be competent. If U.S. forces hold back, they are blamed by an Iraqi
population that is being infantilized by displacing all responsibilities onto
the American occupation. In the New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan, writing
with a Baghdad dateline, says that only U.S. forces, which "have become an essential part of the
landscape here -- their own tribe, in effect," can be "an honest broker"
between warring factions, "more peacekeeper than belligerent." But he
also reports: "With U.S
reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never fully restored to
begin with, decays by the hour. . . . The level of corruption that pervades
Iraq's ministerial orbit . . . would have made South Vietnam's kleptocrats
blush. . . . [C]orruption has helped drive every public service measure --
electricity, potable water, heating oil -- down below its prewar norm." Kaplan tells of a
student who, seeing insurgents preparing a mortar attack, called a government
emergency number. Fortunately for him, no one answered. Later, friends warned
him that callers' numbers appear at the government's emergency office and that
they are sold to insurgents. The student took Kaplan to see a wall adorned with
a picture and death announcement of a man whose call was answered. Today, with all three
components of the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea --
more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002, the country
would welcome, and Iraq's political class needs to hear, as a glimpse into the
abyss, presidential words as realistic as those Britain heard on June 4, 1940. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/01/AR2006030101935.html We Can't Force Democracy Commentary by Robert
D. Kaplan, Washington Post, 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 |
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