Modest Goals

Ok, my modest goal of the day is to outline the problems underlying current US foreign policy. What I've been thinking for some time is that the problem runs deeper than merely the clumsy and heavy-handed diplomacy of the Bush administration. What is at issue here is the validity of the democratic peace theory (DPT). DPT states that democracies do not enter into conflict with each other. The theory focuses largely on institutional barriers (the difficulty of going to war), the influence of the media in democracies, and the increased likelihood of democracies to share interconnecting ties with each other. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties have adopted this theory wholesale. The theory, however, is in its intellectual infancy. It is not at all nuanced. It does not take into account economics as Amy Chua so handily points out in her book, World on Fire. Even, however, if DPT turns out to have some value after more factors are taken into account, this will still not speak to the methodology by which it could be used as foreign policy tool. It is conceivable, as Prince Abdullah of Jordan pointed out yesterday, that the only path to a true democracy starts from within a country. Snyder and Mansfield have written a paper pointing out that any change in government, whether towards democracy or an authoritarian regime is very likely to result in conflict. In my mind, the fundamental problem with forceable, military-led regime change is that it creates a psychological atmosphere wherein the occupying force can do NOTHING wrong if they are to maintain legitimacy. The difficulty of the situation is compounded by the fact that war, the most gruesome of human institutions, is the action most likely to ruin the image of any party involved. I would be hard-pressed to find a conflict in which both sides have not committed atrocities. The differences between, for instance, World War II (another war of atrocities) and the current conflict in Iraq are two-fold. First, the flow of information is larger and faster than it has ever been. Soldiers have always taken pictures during combat, but now they inevitably get leaked to the whole world. People in every country can view our mess-ups with a few key strokes. Second, this was a war of choice. We DID NOT have to go to war in Iraq, all pleas of WMD and spreading freedom aside. Saddam is not a nice or pleasant man. This, however, is not a good motivation for regime change. We were never attacked by Iraq. Saddam's supposed ties to terrorists were limited to a training camp in northern Iraq - an area Saddam didn't even control. I am not so cynical to think that this war was ALL about oil, though I know that we would never have attacked an identical regime in Sub-Saharan Africa. This war then, was about the DPT. The Bush administration (and the Clinton administration before them) believed that democracy must be spread, if necessary by force. Clinton, on the other hand, chose countries in which to spread democracy where the citizens would generally be happy about any sort of outside intervention. Iraq was no such country. Iraq is a land drawn arbitrarily on a map by the British. As such, it has virtually no internal unity. It was held together by an iron fist. Despite warnings prior to conflict, the Bush administration did not believe dire predictions that Iraq would fractionalize, that people in the Middle East are proud and would not take well to occupation. Not everybody has such a short perspective on history as Americans. Iraqis remember well that not long ago they were colonized by white Westerners. They didn't like it then, and they don't like it now. Iraq could well end up a democracy with increased freedoms, but I suspect that if it happens, it will be at the hand of far-seeing Iraqis who will also have little love for Americans whose bombs they have seen kill many and whose soldiers have wrongfully imprisoned and tortured their people.