I don’t mean Wolfowitz. In this case, I mean Max Boot, author of A Democratic World Is No Neocon Folly, which appeared in the LA Times (reg required) and the Financial Times. Boot’s argument goes to the heart of the division in the current presidential campaign. (That heart is largely obscured by partisan mud, but it’s there.) The split is between those who believe in the export of democracy first (Bush) and those who don’t (Kerry). The arguments on the nay side range from the unsophisticated or racist (Arabs can’t handle democracy, etc.) to the seemingly more advanced (economic development must come before democracy). Boot takes on the second, more intelligent, reason with social scientific research:
Anyone seduced by these arguments would do well to peruse two important studies conducted by scholars with impeccable liberal credentials. The first is a new book called “The Democracy Advantage,” written by Joseph Siegle, a former humanitarian aid worker; Michael Weinstein, a former New York Times editorial writer; and Morton Halperin, a former staff member of the ACLU and the Clinton administration who now works for George Soros’ Open Society Institute. They’re hardly neocons, yet in a synopsis of their book published in Foreign Affairs they make a powerful case for democracy promotion.
Siegle, Weinstein and Halperin puncture the myth that democracy works only in rich nations. In fact, many poor countries have freely elected governments (think India, Poland and Brazil) while some rich ones (think Saudi Arabia and Singapore) do not. Far from economic development being necessary for democracy, they argue that democracy promotes economic development. Free countries grow faster than their more repressive neighbors. They also perform better on social measures such as life expectancy, literacy rates, clean drinking water and healthcare. And they are less prone to armed conflict.
A link to the Foreign Affairs article is here. I also urge all to read the Boot article. It’s worth the registration rigamarole. (hat tip: Catherine Johnson)
UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson’s essay for today is not unrelated. It begins with a quote from Clemenceau: “War is a series of catastrophes that results in victory.”
While the fundamental argument regarding which can or must come first (economic development or democracy) is an interesting one and has real importance, it misses a very large point of unfortunate reality in the 21st Century. Nations need not be democratic nor particularly well developed economically to become nuclear powers or, perhaps more dangerously, become part of “hi-tech terrorist cabal”.
Neither India nor Pakistan is particularly wealthy. One is the world’s largest democracy the other a military dictatorship (making, perhaps, some fits and starts toward democracy). Both are nuclear and military powers at least in the regional sense. China, while it is fast developing economically, is not a democracy yet is a nuclear power. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand all show increasing technological capability and economic development. Are any of those democratizing?
While it may an deeply underlying theme of this election I believe the argument misses the point or, perhaps, the point is less important than figuring out how to deal with non-democratic yet technologically and/or economically capable nations. Democracies are, by all evidence I am aware of, significantly more peaceful that non-democracies. Economic development is all well and good, but with a virulent strain that alleges to be part of a religion to which 2B people subscribe, there are more pressing issues.
The fundamental problem for the developed countries and the “West” is no longer (if it ever really has been) whether or not the third world can be economically developed or how to proceed to help the third world develop itself economically. The fundamental problem has shifted to trying to keep non-democracies, economically developed or otherwise, from destroying the political and economic health of the developed and democratic nations.
Knucklehead:
India is not poor in the conventional sense. It truly is two nations: a backwards 3rd world country of 700 million people and a well educated, western advanced nation of 300 million people. We interact with westernized component but often see the 3rd world component because it it an open society.
China is following that developmental mode; an increasingly western modern country on the Pacific Coast and a backward, still Maoist-like interior. We generally don’t see this because China is a closed society that doesn’t give a lot access to the interior.
A lot of Westerners were expecting win by compromise by the modern democratic leaning China in 1987. However, the authorities used what is still mostly a peasant army to put it down.
Roger and Knucklehead:
The interesting thing for me is that 35 years ago when I was a Poli. Sci. major we studied a book (can’t remember the title but I think that it was “Green…”)about this with regard to India. The premise was that India did not have to be Communist to succeed. This was a very debatable point. Many academics held that only Communism could allow a poverty stricken country to survive and prosper.
They, condescendingly, said that maybe later they could handle democracy.
Seems that the more things change……(I refuse to speak French ;^)
Um… So…
“Democracy” is… (wait, I got it, I got it)… “good” ?
Those who echo the “Brown Men Can’t Vote” whine should surely be reading Chrenkoff’s “Good News…” series,
http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/2004/08/good-news-from-afghanistan-part-3.html
the good news of which includes that “almost 80 percent of eligible voters” have registered,
http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=72395
inluding but not limited to the former King,
http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=73621
Jerry,
India and China are, at least to me, beyond comprehension. Each seems to be, as you suggest, more than one “country” or “political model” or “economy” or whatever. India still has a strong caste system and while democratic on the surface seems to still have a very real underlying “raja” culture that is resistant to full democratization and even economic development. There remains a HUGE number of dirt poor people there.
China seems to be developing into three layers – a hyper-modern superwealthy layer (roughly 20 – 30 million people), a well developed and relatively modern middle class (200 – 300 millions?), and a class of people basically still living in 18th or 19th century conditions (400 – 600 million?)
I have some faith that India will muddle through its problems and keep moving forward in a peaceful fashion.
China, on the other hand, strikes me as a ticking time bomb. I don’t see how China resolves its problems without passing through a really nasty phase and it is too big to have purely “internal” problems. There used to be an expression that was something like When Uncle Sam sneezed the rest of the world catches a cold. Not that I expect to be around to see it, but it will be Chinese sneezing that gives the world the flu in another half century or so.
hi all
Here’s the Amazon link for The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity And Peace
by Morton H. Halperin, JOSEPH T. SIEGLE, Michael M. Weinstein
I’m preordering the book.
The bottom line, it seems to me (although I am completely unable to articulate it) is that we’re reaching a point where tecnological capability is no longer “hard-wired” to economic capability and the world does not have the luxury anymore of waiting while countries muddle their way through their political and economic issues to someday emerge as productive and peaceful democracies. We can’t afford to allow sick political systems to “work it out” – there isn’t enough time. We have to tear down the sick political systems and then try to muddle through the economic issues.
Zeppenwolf!
That bit about the former king getting his voter card is priceless! Thanks for the links.
back again
I read the FOREIGN AFFAIRS excerpt of THE DEMOCRACY ADVANTAGE yesterday in Dave and Buster’s, while waiting for 3 10-year olds to use up $75-worth of arcade tokens. (That was a trip.)
I was shocked back to reality.
We’ve all gotten a bit hyperfocused on the WOT, pure and simple, of late. (“Hyperfocused” is a term used by people who treat ADHD.)
Winning, losing, Sept 10 people, Sept 11 people, who goes offensive, who stays on defense, and so on.
This has happened, I’m sure, because of election politics & their requirements.
The FOREIGN AFFAIRS article blew me away.
Suddenly I remembered: Oh, right.
Democracy.
That’s the point of all this.
Transformation of the Middle East.
Democratic transformation of the Middle East.
It’s well worth buying a copy of the new FOREIGN AFFAIRS to read the whole article. (You can also purchase the article online.)
The empirical data is overwhelming: democracy can and should precede “development.” Very poor countries can democratize, and when they do democratize they improve immensely the lives of their citizens and the functioning of their nations.
At present this is the exact opposite of most of the world’s stated policy.
Our own State Department, as well as international institutions like the World Bank, believe that economic development logically precedes democracy. Very poor countries have to reach a certain level of economic development in order to build strong democracies.
In fact, the various international institutions, such as the World Bank & the IMF, are explicitly prohibited from taking democracy into account in making loans.
Our own State Department, on its web site, says that economic development precedes democratic development.
The one significant problem–and it is significant–with the new book is that, at least in the FOREIGN AFFAIRS excerpt, it is ahistorical.
It also appears to be somewhat a-poli-sci in that it doesn’t address the question of what a country needs in order to democratize. We know that no Islamic country has ever democratized apart from Turkey, and we know that Turkey democratized by suppressing Islam and imposing secularism.
So . . . where does that leave us with the ME?
The article doesn’t say.
There is also the question of whether one country can forcibly export democracy to another.
So this article alone cannot prove that the neoconservative project of Democratic transformation of the ME is right.
But it provides a vast amount of evidence that the Democratic transformation of the ME is a damned good idea, if it can be done.
The neoconservative project is not a fool’s errand; it is not the result of “dangerous naivete” or “foolish idealism.”
It’s vital that we find out where John Kerry stands not just on “Iraq,” not just on the WOT, but specifically on the question of democracy in the Middle East.
Does John Kerry support the democratic transformation of the Middle East as a major foreign policy goal?
My sense is that the answer is no.
But I’m not sure we know.
I think it’s worth posting the summary of the FOREIGN AFFAIRS article:
Let us suppose for a moment that ‘democracy’ is a good thing for all in whatever form it is implemented and that ‘autocracy’ is a bad thing to be resisted and eliminated wherever it is found. Let us then make a list of all autocracies and begin to prioritize the list on whatever utilitarian principle seems most reasonable. OK, now we have a prioritized list so we know where to start. Perhaps we should now consider the cost?
Zimbabwe has risen to the top of my list, how much I am prepared to pay for democracy in Zimbabwe? A brother? A son? Two nephews? Hmm. Let’s think about that later. How about taxes, how much am I willing to pay in increased taxes so that Zimbabweans can breath free air? $50 a month? $100 a month? $5 a month? I dunno, this is a bit complicated. If this democracy thing is so danged good, how much are the Zimbabweans willing to pay? Perhaps we should let them make a downpayment in blood and treasure before we determine to chip in the balance.
Idle chatter about the “necessary” preconditions for democracy may be an interesting intellectual exercise for some but time might be better spent determining which countries have a suffiecient percentage of inhabitants willing to pay the butchers bill to overthrow the autocrats. We can’t give democracy to people. Our interests may be served by helping some people to try and win it but they have to be people who once having attained power are willing to let it go. I would suggest that history provides cold comfort to any idealist who believes that simply instituting democracy serves as a lasting benefit. Absent strong checks and balances and quite a bit of reverence for British common law, democracy is simply a vehicle in which the next autocrat will ride to power. Take a look at Russia today if that seems a bit harsh.
Sorry, this is so important I feel compelled to post another brief excerpt from the article itself:
It seems that “development first, democracy later” argument is another one of those ideas whose time has passed.
To work around required registrations on non-pay sites go to BugMeNot
They have already registered passwords for thousands of sites.
“The split is between those who believe in the export of democracy first (Bush) and those who don’t (Kerry).”
In that case this conservative should cheer for John Kerry! War for any ideology is a terrifying idea.
Pakistan would not be helping the US in the war against Al Qaeda if it were democratic. A government in Saudi Arabia governing to the will of the people would not be good for the West. Even in Kuwait something like half the population supported Bin Laden’s attacks on the US – mind you, 6o Minutes was the source for that info, so…
I must say I take great offence at those who suggest that it’s racist to believe democracy isn’t for Arabs. Though Blair’s disgraceful behaviour this week on foxhunting leaves me wondering why anyone would be so supportive of modern mass democracy in the first place. But I suppose it’s better than a dictatorship.
Given the social structure of most Arab societies I don’t see how Western-style democracy can really work. Extended families based on cousin marriage forming tribes naturally look at the world very differently from individualistic Westerners. They are justifiably horrified by the kind of society that permits abortion and sees nothing wrong with dumping elderly family members into institutions outside of the family. To them we are the barbarians!
Another problem is Islam. Yes I know George Bush tells us it is a religion of peace – surely he doesn’t really believe that – and we are constantly told that ignorance is the reason there is anti-Islamic sentiment in the West. Yet in my case the more I learned of Islam – mostly at the university level – the more repellent it became in my eyes. Even those Islamic countries that have some democracy tend to be the ones that don’t take their religion too seriously.
I hope it does work in Iraq and that I turn out to be wrong. But I haven’t seen anything in the last year or so to change my original view that this whole nation-building, democracy-exporting endeavour is unrealistic and likely to make the world even more dangerous.
Rick:
how much I am prepared to pay for democracy in Zimbabwe? A brother? A son? Two nephews?
I wasn’t aware that your relatives were yours to spend, Rick. Perhaps they have their own views on what they would like to do with their lives, which might include risking them to help the people of Zimbabwe and, not coincidentally, make America and the rest of the planet safer.
Most of the rest of your post I actually agree with. The question to be grappled with, though, is whether we can afford not to make the investment, however poor it may be, in civilizing/democratizing the most backward parts of the planet. As Afghanistan and the Taliban has shown, benign neglect is not a cost-free option.
Catherine,
While I’d join you making a bet the Kerry does not believe that democratizing the ME is necessary or even “desireable” (we only need to look at his positions wrt to Vietnam and Nicaragua), I don’t know that pinning him down to a “no” or “yes” answer would change anything wrt to the presidential race.
I seriously doubt that most Americans can be persuaded of either case. I think this is too much a “view from 30,000 feet” argument for most people – they would tend to think of it as intellectual claptrap.
And the economic-development-first belief seems more ingrained to those who five it any thought – it is, I think, the “elitist” or “educated” position to take. How did that view get so prominent, BTW? Who do we have to blame for that? My answer is the MSM and our wonderful eductation system. It typically takes a decade or so of working for a living to get people’s heads cleared of the political idiocies our academy is filling them with. And some never seem to fight it off.
I’m not attempting to straw-man your Lesser Two-Thirds, but is this basic argument, perhaps, the underlying thing that concerns him most about the “dangerousness” of Bush’s ME (or Iraq) policy?
It could be argued that glasnost made it more difficult for perestroika to take hold. In China the elite certainly think that way.
Rick,
I wouldn’t make the prioritized list according to form of government. I’d make it according to danger represented to neighbors and world at large. Then start working through it it to get rid of the largest, most pressing dangers. The nations at the top of the list are relatively few but the dangers they represent are too great for an cost/benefit analysis. The “cost” of letting them survive is too high.
The fact that the democracies would be way down near the bottom of the list just tells us that democracies don’t normally represent much danger to friends and neighbors (beyond the dangers inherent in competition) what type of government to try to put in place when we are forced to get rid of whatever was there.
Personally I really don’t give a rat’s butt if some other nation wants a benevolent monarchy – that’s their business. If North Korea or Iran didn’t represent real dangers for anyone but the poor saps who have to live there whether or not we should do anything about their sick regimes would probably never get much beyond the rhetoric phase. Not a purist view but we can’t solve everyone’s misery.
Part of the problem with this sort of discussion is that there will always be the “if you don’t have enough candy for everyone then nobody gets any candy” crowd (otherwise known as the “we can’t police the entire world so let’s not police any of it” crowd). Pragmatism is, unfortunately, an exercise in painful hypocricy.
R C Dean,
You’re right about the relatives. I should have put it slightly differently. I simply find it wearisome to see policy debate framed in “greater good of mankind” terms without addressing what the cost of a particular proposal might be in personal terms. And you’re right about the necessity to pay the bill in trying to provide for the long term defense of US interests.
“The question to be grappled with, though, is whether we can afford not to make the investment, however poor it may be, in civilizing/democratizing the most backward parts of the planet.”
I think that the question is more one of where, when and how much rather than whether.
Coisty,
Please expand on that statement.
It’s not a matter of democracy as ideology. It’s a matter of pragmatic existential struggle. Churchill made the point when he defined democracy as the worst polical system except for all the others. We don’t need to export democracy for its ideological superiority. We need to export it because, for all its flaws, it has the beneficial side effect of breaking down the brutalities of authoritarianism, tribalism, and all the other stupid, aggressive “isms” that lead large groups of people to believe they have some need and duty or calling from Allah to slaughter other people. Democratic systems give their citizens other things to worry about than sitting around stewing over why they are miserable. They give us elections and such to hyper-focus on rather than, for example, hyper-focusing on bringing Death to the Great Satan.
Democracy promotion is tricky indeed. In Iraq, I’m sure that the US and ordinary Iraqis would gladly welcome a new strongman provided that he halts the insurgency and expels the Islamist factions spread around the country. Now, of course, that could also lead us back to where we started, but it would provide the elusive “stability”.
What’s difficult is that in order to gain support in our counter-terrorist activities in the Middle East, we have to rely on repressive autocracies, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. So full-scale democracy promotion isn’t feasible at the moment, and anyway would be far too big a project for us to attempt.
Russia is a good example. If Putin can end the Chechen rebellion that so terrifies Russians, the citizens doubtfully won’t mind that he has veered away from democracy. Ideally, there would be a thriving independent media and genuinely competitive national elections in Russia, but I think we’ll have to wait awhile for that to occur again.
Reforming the Middle East is a tricky puzzle. Anybody who claims they know exactly what to do can’t be taken seriously. Clearly, we can’t adopt a Buchananite policy that Coisty suggests.
It’s more than a little naive to think, however, that we can spread democracy in the Middle East by simply overthrowing its dictators and occupying its people.
Rick (OT):
What do you make of today’s Gallup poll? And yesterday’s Pew (apt name!) poll?
Jamie Irons
Question to the readers of the blog:
Would there be a way to tie in economic incentives with democratization? As in isolating autocratic regimes economically? I know this is simplistic, but cases where the French enjoyed a lucrative business relationship with Saddam Hussein weren’t helpful at all to say the least.
Knucklehead
Hah!
That’s where you’re wrong!
I was just talking to my husband: this is called modernization theory.
Inside academia it’s been discredited for thirty years.
Talk about an idea whose time has passed.
I’m all for democracy promotion. I was one of the few on the left saying from the beginning that a war to take out Saddam Hussein wouldn’t be a terrible thing. I had some hesitations about doing it right away because we needed to focus more effort on Afghanistan, but I was willing to be persuaded.
It seems to me, though, that the Bush administration has screwed this up six ways from Tuesday.
Not enough troops on the ground to establish security after the war was the main mistake from the beginning. The other error we’re still recovering from was putting a bunch of partisans with little experience for it in the CPA.
The rest of the criticisms I’ve read sound pretty debatable, but these are the cardinal errors that we have not been able to overcome. I heard even some of the main proponents of war in Iraq (Bill Kristol, most prominently) making the troop argument from early on.
Instead of doing something about it, we still hear President Bush saying that the situation over there is improving, even as the body counts, attacks, and instability rise. What world is he living in?
I don’t know that Kerry can do anything that Bush isn’t already trying. I do know that Bush got us into the mess, and I’m going to hold him responsible for these kind of avoidable mistakes.
back again
Modernization theory was a Cold War idea.
The FOREIGN AFFAIRS article credits Seymour Martin Lipset with its invention.
It was abandoned because it didn’t describe empirical reality.
The theory was that if you helped countries develop their economies they would become democracies, and they would not become Communist.
Instead, often enough Westerners found these countries doing all the horrible things the economic development was supposed to prevent them from doing.
What would happen is that one segment of the economy would get rolling (assuming I’m repeating this right) and the people associated with that part of the economy would take absolute control, leaving everyone else poor & broke . . . and at some point Raging Nationalism would come in (I forget why he said nationalism got stoked by economic-development-first-democracy-second . . . )
As well, it was obvious that wealth didn’t inevitably lead to democracy. Germany was wealthy for years without becoming a democracy.
Shouldnít we be concentrating more on introduction of liberty to the region, as in ìthe state in which a man is not a subject to coercion by arbitrary will of othersî and equality before the law? Majority rule (or democracy) is only a process, and can be used to either curtail individual liberty or expand it.
As it happens, we who enjoy life in liberal, western democracies find that democratic process is most compatible with our freedoms, but look at other countries, such as Russia. People there may have perfectly well set up system of voting, yet there are missing critical element, the rule of the law, that puts every citizen at equal footing and prevents arbitrary application of punishment and privilege. So, they end up with scandals, corruption and arbitrary actions from the rulers.
I think that economic development also depends on very strong legal system, because you cannot operate efficient economy without enforcement of contracts between the parties. We take so much for granted here that we tend to forget that the reason that we trust merchants, mortgage lenders etc. is the legal system. That trust is not a result of some sort of mystical Western culture. We forget that frauds, corruptionand plain stealing are common anywhere people can get away with it.
A wonderful book on the subject is The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek. I understand the Dame Thatcher is quite a fanÖ
Catherine,
I’m gonna have to take your word for it. I don’t see any particular lessening of academia’s scorn for the hateful neocon notions about democratizaton or lessening of academia’s apparent love for the revolutions of the proletariat.
If the idea of “modernization theory” has been discreditted then it has been replaced by “welfarization theory” – turning the “third world” into welfare wards of the “developed world”.
Well, if academia has wised up I guess we’ll just need to patiently wait for all the minds they filled with horse manure to retire.
The view that economic development must occur before the development of democracy is a shared vision on both sides of the political spectrum. Both socialists, who really donít believe in representative government anyway, and free marketers accept a Marxian view of crude economic determinism. Both parties believe that economic substructure determine social superstructure. This is a 19th century legacy that we need to dispense with.
The promotion of Democracy, really Republican government, is not a matter of economic development but of the creation of a responsible citizen. Democracy is not about dollars; itís about the creation of a civil society that is dependent on the individuals and not governing institutions lording over subjects. The reason that socialism and democracy are ultimately incompatible is that socialism subordinates the citizen to the state converting him from a free man to a subject. A nationís level of economic development says little about a societyís capacity for self-government. If a nation has developed or encourages the creation of a civil society it can easily develop Republican institutions long before it is an economic success. Free markets in and of themselves may foster democracy but donít guarantee it. The reason that Mussolini broke with socialism is the realization that the socialist economic model is false. Fascism is quite compatible with private property and free market economics. One of the reasons that fascist-like societies are more easily transformed into democratic ones then socialist societies is that the economic model used to support the state develops a cadre of proto-citizens that can flourish once the political constraints are removed.
Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries have market friendly populations so the question is how do we in the west help them create citizens from subjects? If I had an answer Iíd be a rich man. It is clear that the forces of reaction, i.e., the Salafists and the Baathist revanchists [sp?] are trying their best to retard and/or prevent the development of civil society so they can once again impose their will upon a subject population.
The way I remember it from mid-80s college course:
Benevolent dictatorship
Political stability
Rule of law
Economic stability
Rise of middle class
Assumption of governing power by middle class (i.e., democracy)
Knucklehead
is this basic argument, perhaps, the underlying thing that concerns him most about the “dangerousness” of Bush’s ME (or Iraq) policy?
The good news on the Home Front continues: my husband and I just this minute had an entirely civil conversation about a) Ralph Peters and b) Hendrick Hertzberg (sp?), and any two people who can have a civil conversation with both those guys in the same few sentences can obviously have a conversation about why my husband thinks Bush’s ME policy is dangerous and naive. (He does use the word “naive.”)
For what it’s worth, he said just this minute that he’s come to the feeling democracy in the ME will probably be impossible until Islam is reformed. (He’s written about the role Christianity played in French history, and he was one of the first people to say religion matters to history & can matter more than “material causes.”)
Then he amended that position to say that actually he thinks what might work, short of religious reform, would be religious pluralism.
That struck me as extremely plausible.
Obviously, we’re still finding out just how serious a conversation we can have without breaking into a food fight over FRANCE-SUCKS! and GEORGE-BUSH-SUCKS! . . . but he said he’s thinking that if a ME country, like Iraq, adopted religious pluralism, you would then have circumvented Islam’s view that there is no distinction between the secular and the spiritual world.
Once you’ve signed on for religious pluralism, the Koran by defintion is not going to be in charge.
And once the Koran is not in charge, you can have democracy (or at least democracy is not ruled out).
Until somebody convinces me otherwise, I’m going to hold that thought.
He’s been reading a fascinating diplomatic history of Algeria (I’ll get the title), and he knows the situation there pretty well. (I know nothing about it.)
SO . . . I suspect he’s seeing parallels between Iraq & Algeria, and is concerned about whether we’re still going to be fighting an insurgency in Iraq 10 years from now (how long has the Algerian conflict been going on?) . . . and how that serves the cause of defeating Islamic terror (uh–good question!)
One great thing: the Algeria book has a huge amount of material on the ways in which weak rebel forces use Western media to their own ends.
My husband said something to me like, “Publicity is the weapon of the weak.”
So now he’s thinking exactly the way I think about the media & our war effort: he’s thinking about how long you can reasonably expect to maintain political legitimacy for a war–and what you need to do to hold onto political legitimacy.
He’s also thinking Vietnam in the way we probably all should be thinking Vietnam: do we have a strategy to win in Iraq?
Or are we now fighting what John Moore calls a “half-assed war”?
Are we in a “hearts and minds” situation where we can’t stomp on Fallujah because that will turn everyone against Allawi’s government, but if we don’t stomp on Fallujah we keep fighting tactical battles against what Ralph Peters calls a “terrorist city-state”?
These are questions that are clearly on a lot of conservatives’ minds, too.
Jamie,
In re Gallup, Pew, my total response after deep thought and reflection is “I dunno.”
Both the Pew second poll and the Gallup poll are showing under 30′s as being in desperate need of heavy doses of Thorazine. My bet is that W is up by 3 per the RCP 3 way average on Oct. 1. That’s a 1% per week drop from today and I believe that Oct. 1 will be the bottom for W.
Catherine:
Actually Imperial Germany was well on its way to becoming a constitutional monarchy when WWI intervened. In 1914, the Kaiser was very much like a 18th Century British Sovereign. He had tremendous power but often needed the support of an elected legislature to carry out his plans. He could always ignore the other branch but only at increasing risk. The Reichstag was actually more broadly based then the House of Commons at the time of the American Revolution.
I have come to conclusion that a German victory in WWI would not have been ìthe end the world as we know it.î Wilhelm II would have exerted an unhealthy influence on world affairs for some time but the accelerating pace of change would have brought German government institutions up to the British level of Parliamentary superiority by mid-Century. It was inevitable. Had the Germans won, there would have been no Second World War on the scale of 1939-45. I don’t think the Soviet Union would have become a global threat and there would have been no Holocaust. Actually Germany, along with the United States and the UK, would have been among most Jewish friendly place in the world.
Defeat swept away Germany’s developing constitutional underpinnings and replaced them jury rigged half measures that would lead to political chaos and dictatorship.
Robert D. Kaplan, who likes to travel in the hellholes of the world, says democracy is one of the worse things that can be foisted on an uncivil society (that is, one with the rule of law, enforceable contracts, etc.).
He says democracy leads in multi-ethnic places like Azerbajin tend to lead to the dominant majority killing or deporting the minority.
Of course, he also says any economic development in a country which does not have the protections of a civil society is bound to be shallow.
Knucklehead – “Please expand on that statement”
Just referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union as soon as there was some political freedom. Unfortunately this did not allow for economic restructuring as people expected instant miracles. The Russian people, no longer afraid of the government, often made it difficult to introduce economic reforms and so Russia has been slow to develop a modern economy. In China economic freedom will create a middle class which will eventually push for political reform. Perhaps the Chinese elite sees political reform being less disruptive, especially to the longterm interests of that elite itself, if it occurs AFTER a market economy has brought positive change to the lives of most of the Chinese people.
I’m not sure if it will work and I don’t have a strong view either way regarding economic development and democracy and which must come first. But when I hear the democracy exporters I’m reminded of the old socialists who talked about the inevitability of socialism and their arrogant assumption that socialism meant progress. Each political culture is different and it is arrogant and ignorant to believe that American-style mass democracy is the solution to terrorism or that it is even a desire of the world’s people. Even lower middle class Mexicans don’t like the way the US is run and often pity Americans – only the poorest and least well educated Mexicans flock to the US – so expecting Arab Muslims to accept a foreign system of government imposed by foreigners was naive in the extreme. As long as US troops are in Iraq the nation’s focus will not be on democracy or economic improvements, but on the humiliation of being occupied by a non-Arab non-Muslim foreign power.
Cain – “Clearly, we can’t adopt a Buchananite policy that Coisty suggests.”
Is that an attempt to discredit anyone who disagrees with forcing democracy on the Middle East by connecting them to an unpopular political figure?
jerry
Interesting thoughts on pre-WWI Germany with which I largely agree. WWII was a continuation of WWI. The pre-WWI German Jews were very enthusiastic German patriots who were eager to go to war to fight on the German side.
Are you aware of Kaiser Bill’s plans to attack New York and Boston in 1897 in order to take over the US and convert the Atlantic into a “German sea”? That fact makes me skeptical of the claim that everything would have been just peachy if the Germans had won, but I’m pretty sure the Germans of that day were not the monsters the British managed to convince us of through their adroit propaganda and the cutting of the underwater cable to Germany.
WitchaBoy:
Yes I am aware of it but I don’ think it was a realistic plan. See Morris’s Theodore Rex. After the Kaiser’s confrontation with TR I am sure he dropped the plan.
Left in Texas,
Where would you have removed troops from so that more troops could be put on the ground to establish security? And what do you mean by “security”? I’ll make an assumption and pre-apologize if it is incorrect, but “more security” generally seems to means something similar to “fewer American casualties”. If that is the case, what evidence do you have that more troops would have reduced the number of casualties or, to put it differently, do you have any evidence that more troops would have reduced the rate of casualties per troops deployed significantly enough to overcome the fact that there were more troops deployed? Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a discussion of some of the aspects of this, but no nice tabular data that I recall. IIRC correctly the casualty rate per troops deployed is very low for both Iraq and Afghanistan – a significant reduction (40 or 50%?) over other significant wars (a number like 3.2 or 3.6 vs. low 6′s to high 8′s per 1000? deployed – these are off the top of the head numbers subject to research I don’t have time to repeat).
But just looking at the arithmetic angle, if you have X casualties per Y troops deployed and you increase troops deployed, unless you decrease the rate you’ll get a larger X.
It is very difficult to make a case that more troops would have yielded fewer casualties or even some other measure of “greater security”. Going through Iraqi trouble spots house by house and kicking in doors and cleaning everything possible out as much as possible could have been done, would certainly have required more boots on the ground, but its hard to make a case that it wouldn’t have yielded more casualties and it is not a given that security would be higher. Repeated hi-contact sweeps would be required and soldiers get killed doing that sort of thing.
The campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been waged like no other sizeable campaigns I am aware of and the results, IMO, speak for themselves – if you can identify less bloody campaigns for either US troops or non-combatants in the campaign area I’d love to hear about it. Whether or not ultimate success will be achieved remains to be seen, but just because there is still fighting and US troops are getting killed isn’t sufficient to declare it improperly run. I’m sure Thibaud will come and help out with the “run like shit” argument but I just don’t see it. Its a war and, so far, its been about the least bloody war imaginable.
As for putting a bunch of partisans on the CPA, which non-partisans would you have suggested?
Algeria
This is interesting.
I just checked out the diplomatic history of the Algerian war my husband has been reading, and found this reader comment on Amazon:
A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era by Matthew Connelly
The book may move some readers to conclude that Dulles & Eisenhower would be doves in the current administration (I’m thinking that by “doves” this reader probably means the Powell camp.)
But so far it’s been sparking my husband to sound far more hawkish than he has in the past.
I’m going to have to read it.
One cool factoid: way back in the 1950s the U.S. was worried about Islamic radicalism, and saw it as a force that was going to grow and threaten Western countries.
In the 1950s!
Catherine,
I don’t know if we’re fighting a half-assed war or not. I think we agree that the Old-Think Arabism of the State Department should be considered yet another of the “failed policies” or ideas whose time has passed.
When I look at the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns (and its difficult to look at them in detail) I don’t see much that looks familiar. We’re not fighting this war the way we fought wars in the past. That, IMO, is HUGE and makes assessment of what’s going on nearly impossible for anyone who isn’t a real, bonafide expert. It is so vastly different that trying to measure it by how anything was done previously just doesn’t seem to make sense to me.
And for all those claiming there are better ways to go about “nation building” I sure wish they’d provide some examples because I just don’t see them. This is so intensely different than anything we’ve tried before that I am, quite franky, awed by the capability our military has demonstrated. I honestly marvel at it. I had no idea we had such capability.
As for dealing with Islam… there again how the heck does anyone know if it can be done or not. Whatever we or anyone else had been doing wasn’t working, that seems obvious. It also seems obvious to me that a Kerry administration would snap us back to Old Think so fast it would make our heads spin. I fully admit I don’t understand what the New Think is, but I sure as hell don’t want anymore of the Old Think.
When 9/11 happened I accepted that we were at war and I figured we needed to “get radical and adapt” because it wasn’t going to look like any previous war. Well, it hasn’t looked like any previous war. But I have no ability to determine how radical we’ve gotten or how well we’re adapting. From what I can gather, though, the enemy is way more baffled and flailing. At this point I take that as a good sign.
I honestly don’t believe that pouring 100,000 troops into Afghanistan to scour the mountains for every last cave and vipers nest would have been a good idea. The Russians tried that and they lost 25,000 lives doing it and killed who knows how many Afghanis. It seems to me we’ve done significantly better. The Former King, after all, just got his voting card
As for Iraq, that’s even more different. Nothing is going to look “good” if all we hear about is the bombs and dead. But damn, if the country were really on the verge of civil war we’d be caught in such a mess that 1,000 dead would seem like nothing. Again, I don’t buy that its failing – day to day difficulties, even when they last for months on end, are not necessarily the same thing as failure.
In the back of my Heart of Darkness, however, I have this horrible fear that Islam is not reformable. But I keep my fingers crossed ’cause I really don’t want Nuke ‘em Till They Glow So We Can Hunt Them Easily In the Dark
Catherine,
Actually, Charles Martel indicated a similiar level of concern in 732 at Poitiers.
Jerryís civil society is a society of with the rule of law. I realize that private property rights are unfashionable as concept those days, but they are critical for development of stable society. Hernan de Soto argues that lack of private property protection applied equally trough the all the spectra of the society is the single most important factor keeping poor societies poor, regardless of their natural resources and human potential. There is a some modicum of truth in the ìroot causeî argument and that is the revolutionary fervor is can be stirred easier when there is mass of poor, propertyless people without prospect for the future to work with.
I hope that in addition to setting up voting boots, registering voters, and handing money for development of local businesses we are trying to help out with those legal concepts. As I understand one reason why ancient Islam was not economically successful in the long run was that the ruler was granting boons in form of land property to the favorites only for certain periods of time, and they could lose it any time, at a whim of the ruler. Consequently, instead of developing, they were robbing blind their estates.
Conquest and stealing of treasures work only up to a point.
And I agree entirely with Knuck’s 01:29 PM post.
–Even lower middle class Mexicans don’t like the way the US is run and often pity Americans – only the poorest and least well educated Mexicans flock to the US —
Yup, just like we were, and they sent $13 billion back in either 2002 or 2003, 3rd largest source of income for Mexico.
But what can one expect from a country ruled by France and Spain?
This post by a Marine Major at Captain’s Quarters is well worth reading.
And Egypt is finally getting some form of personal property rights.
Don’t have that, don’t have anything.
It’s not all dependent on Iraq. From what little I understand, the ME looks to Egypt as BMOC.
ìAbsent strong checks and balances and quite a bit of reverence for British common law, democracy is simply a vehicle in which the next autocrat will ride to power.î
Maybe instead of sending all that useless monetary aid to all the developing countries we should set up a something akin to a missions to distribute text of Constitution, Federalist papers, bases of legal code and perhaps some works on free markets: This is how it works guys, we can give you advice if you donít get some details, but the application of our receipt for freedom and prosperity is up to you. Ta ta.
I know, I know, this is very callous, but we tried everything else, havenít we?
Catherine
Wow. Sounds like an excellent description of what’s happening in Venezuela right now.
Let me think on this.
Katherine,
Approached from a purely economic basis, Islam is simply theological protection of the banditry from which it arose. Islam also protects shura which seems to be the predominant form of governance within the ME. In its turn shura protects Islam through recognition by the local sheik of the local imam. Add in the concept of inshallah to keep the peasants quiet and you have a system that is very, very difficult to change.
The common law protection of property rights that we are accustomed to is at the very root of American and British democracy. That protection of property rights is simply unknown to the peasant class both in Russia and in the ME. It is such a basic concept to Americans that many of them simply don’t understand that it does not even exist for most of the world’s population.
(And I will be wearing my voting boots to go to the voting booth. )
Tht is, Perviiew, uo booldy bustrd. Noe u aer DAED!!!!!
Coisty,
I think you have to fit this into Stalin’s observation that “Quantity has a quality all its own” or, to put it another way, size matters.
China has roughly a billion people. There are somewhere around 20 or 30 million who have become fabulously wealthy. They apparently consume luxury goods like Teraysa on a crack binge. Behind that there is a “middle class” who are doing quite well by Chinese standards and have reached a number of people that is apparently rivaling the size and (again, by Chinese standards) standard of living of Americans. Behind that is five or six hundred million people who are essentially dirt poor. Without putting a dent into that dirt poor number millions are apparently trying to migrate to the coastal cities to get in on the Big Prosperity Pary and, apparently, having mixed results are none too happy about it.
The Chinese elites are not going to manage to dole out political and economic reform at their own pace as it suits them. There are too many poor people and they are rapidly becoming aware of the ostentatious wealth of the very elites who dole out access to the goodies. Perhaps it can all be handled nice and leisurely without major and violent upheaval. None of us will live to see that – too many people and it will take longer than we have to live. It seems more likely to me that there will some nasty internal problems. It isn’t like the Chinese have huge experience handling modern economies undergoing extraordinary growth rates and even the westerners who have the economic background have no idea how any of that plays when the Billion Pack gets cracked open.
You may, but I don’t, believe that the Great Maoist Miracle is going to march peacefully into the 21st Century. When the internal shit hits the fan over there they’re gonna go external in a big hurry and it ain’t gonna be pretty. They couldn’t even handle SARS in Hong Kong without pissing off half a gojillion people. They can’t look across the straights at Taiwan without huffing and puffing and threatening to blow the house in.
And none of that touches the least bit on the demand on world resources the growth of China and India represent. The Euros and the RoW has been screaming bloody murder at the US since Christ was a Corporal about inordinate consumption of resources. The Chinese are already sucking up something like 1/3 of the world’s concrete production and 1/4 or more of its steel production. Right now that represents a huge market that France and the Euros just salivate over. When it hits high-gear, however, trying to grow an economy to keep those five or six hundred million dirt poor people from Burning Down the Mission, what’s it gonna look like? Any idea what a barrel of petroleum will cost and what that might do to the ability to sustain the necessary growth rates? You don’t suppose the Japanese get nervous about any of this, do you?
Re property rights: Rick, it is worse than that. People around the globe are taught that private property is in fact responsible for inequality, injustice and poverty. And that the reason why America is prosperous it is because we are stealing from the rest of the world (hence the stealing oil mantra).
We have this pragmatical bastard Jean Jacques Rousseau to thank for it, I think.
Coisty:
If the Mexicans really pity us then they can bail out their own peso the next time it tanks instead of expecting our pitiful selves to do it for them.
George Bush did in fact float the idea of tying together politcal reform and World Bank funds. It seems he felt that giving money to corrupt regimes that socked the proceeds in a Swiss bank account while the population suffered was self defeating and wasteful but his idea not widely supported. But since the US provides most of the funds for the World Bank I think such reforms should be required if we are to continue to give aid. There should at least be some accountability.
And the point is not about American style democracy. The point is that democracies rarely go to war with one another and they rarely slaughter their own people. I know that some people think the Arabs are too clannish, well so were the Scots. And some people think Islam is incompatable with representative government but so was Christianity for centuries. How may battles were fought between Catholics and Protestants? How many centuries passed before secular governments ruled Europe?
The point is that without some equity in government there can be no civil society and that in turn leads to terrorism.
So it is not a matter of Americanizing the world. After all the Greeks came up with idea centuries ago without any help from us.
Catherine,
Islam is a problem concept has been recognized before the 1950′s
John Quincy Adams wrote in the 1820′s that Islam was a problem that we would be forced to confront http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/winter2002/samuelson.html
Belaire Heloc and G.K. Chesterton also wrote about the dangers of Islam and the eventual confrontation in the 1920′s.
The warnings have been there, we just chose to ignore or deny them.
Nice discussion here.
I tend to oscillate between isolationist and Wilsonian views. On the isolationist side, I am influenced by George Kennan, the realist who planned the Marshall plan and outlined the strategy of containment. His view was that democracy was mostly a northern european phenomenon and that it was likely to wither in other climes; that we should take other countries as we found them and deal with it. Kennan is one of my heroes, and one of the few thinkers who managed to be prophetic, so I find it hard to discount his views.
On the Wilsonian side, what can I say? Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was free like us? Whether or not there is a realist basis for spreading democracy is an open question. The FA article seems to say yes, but perhaps it is just wishful thinking. I need to think about it, and will probably remain ambivalent even so. Wasn’t there some discussion of this topic in the Federalist Papers?
Jerry, I agree that a German victory in WWI would not have been the end of the world. Bertrand Russell and other war dissenters were of this school. Agreed, he was a SOB and quite bizarre in his old age, but he may have been right on this point. Germany was also regarded as socially progressive at the time, and this disposed some in its favor. It is interesting to speculate on the outcome if Germany had triumphed quickly, as in the Franco-German war. WWI was the death of France, brought forth the Soviet Union, and destroyed the self confidence and optimism of Europe. It was a disaster for western civilization.
Knucklehead:
By security, I was not referring to troop casualties (that’s a whole other discussion that I haven’t followed as closely and I’ll take your word on).
I’m talking about the idea that most NGO’s that would be setting up the elections have either pulled out of Iraq or are confined to the Green Zone. Its hard to run an election all over the country when you can’t go all over the country.
I’m also suggesting that much of the current insurgency has been gaining rather than losing ground as they get better organized and figure out better tactics. With enough troops on the ground initially, we could have clamped down on this from the very beginning and kept them from ever getting organized. The estimates that people who are experts in peacekeeping suggested were closer to 300,000, rather than 150,000.
Where do these troops come from? Well, an international coalition with bigger commitments of troops would be a start. Not to knock the folks we have, but many of them sent 50 – 300 troops, which is not going to get us very far. Was this possible? Maybe not. In which case, we shouldn’t have started this war.
Chuck,
I don’t see the “take other countries as we find them” approach as plausible. The Islamomurderers won’t stay in their own barbaric little caves and hovels. The fascists wouldn’t mind their own borders. The Commies could never shut up about World Revolution. Unfortunately the time has long passed since we could even dream about hiding behind our oceans. And we can’t just retreat from being the largest economy and most powerful military on the planet – the rest of the world won’t let it happen peacefully (the Islamomurderers want us dead, not simply minding our own business far away). And even if it were possible we can’t get to an economy that would match the required political isolationism without levels of pain we don’t want to suffer. It might be nice to imagine, but we aren’t Lichenstein or Switzerland and all the wishing in the world can’t make it so.
We didn’t start this, LiT.
And while “the world” might have the manpower, it doesn’t have the means, including equipment or the will.
We are NATO.
We are it, most everyone else is window-dressing. Including Britain, look at what Tony’s doing and check out the recent article on the EUfighter/Typhoon(?).
You might want to start visiting Rantburg if you’ve never heard of or been to.
LiT,
You identified a 150,000 troop gap and then said
Which leads me to repeat my question. Where are the troops supposed to come from. Research European force levels. Look at what the Russians have and where they are scattered and what they can afford.
The troops aren’t there and even if they could be scratched together we’d have to pay the bill.
hi Rick
The authors define democracy as encompassing checks & balances.
I made the jump to Iraq and to militarily imposed democracy, but the article itself has nothing to do with Iraq (and I think I implied that it did–sorry).
What they are arguing is that foreign policy, including policy set by the IMF & the World Bank, should reward democracy and penalize authoritarian regimes. That is not the case now.
Here’s the definition they use:
They used something called the “Polity IV democracy index” which was created by Ted Robert Gurr of the U. of Maryland in 1990. Countries receive a democracy score 0 to 10, with 10 being the most democratic. (I would guess that rule of law is part of the Polity index, but I don’t know.)
They compared poor democracies to poor autocracies.
Their poor democracies had GDP per capita under $2,000 in constant 1995 dollars and a Polity score between 8 and 10. The poor autocracies had GDP under $2000 and a score between 0 and 2.
Wait!
No!
I didn’t “make the jump” to Iraq—-Max Boot made the jump to Iraq.
(Actually, I made the same jump immediately yesterday, while reading the article. But the authors are not talking about Iraq.)
Cain
That’s what the authors are talking about, though, again, they are not talking about the WOT.
They are talking about economic development policy. Currently it is actually not permissible for either the World Bank or the IMF (I believe it’s both of those two) to base aid on political qualifications.
They strongly urge that all economic aid be tied to measures of democratic activity & reform.
The EU does this, btw. No country can even think about being admitted to the EU without being a solid, high-functioning democracy.
ìThe point is that democracies rarely go to war with one another and they rarely slaughter their own people.î
What was the name of the Nobel winning economist who was making a point that democracies also do not starve their own people? I think that he showed that no famines ever happened in representative democracies. So, as imperfect the system is, it has lots going for it.
Katherine
I think academic types would say yes (though I’m going out on a limb here).
They draw a distinction between “liberalism,” which means rule of law without democracy, and “liberal democracy,” which is what we have.
England was a liberal monarchy for many years.
ìI’m talking about the idea that most NGO’s that would be setting up the elections have either pulled out of Iraq or are confined to the Green Zone.î
Thatís not a bug, but a feature. Iraq will do much better without these parasitic ìdo-goodersî. In fact, that may be the only favor that Al Sadr and Co bestowed on their own country.
Katherine,
I don’t know that Jean Jacques Rousseau was a pragmatist, although he lived in a pragmatic age. I enjoyed the story of his mistress, Therese Le Vasseur, arriving in London and being picked up by some english philosophers (Boswell?), who decided, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, to discover if she was, ahem, as agreeable as Rousseau claimed. They discovered that she was.
I do think that socialism and socialist ideas has been a tragedy for Africa, leading to tyranny and poverty. Damned intellectuals have much to answer for.
Catherine,
I am going on a limb here, but I think that liberty without democracy is better than democracy without liberty (yes, both conditions can exist).
I prefer results to the process.
Knucklehead
Don’t ask me where academia has gone & why.
I was as surprised as you are to learn that modernization theory is 30 years out of date.
Though I can see where you don’t zip from Modernization Theory Is Wrong to Paul Wolfowitz Is Right.
Nobody’s a Marxist anymore; that’s over.
But people seem to have gone to a kind of upside-down Marxism—like Althusser, maybe? (And I’m thinking Gramsci, though I’ve completely forgotten what he had to say.)
To me, it SEEMS—and I would never ever ever put money on my being right about this—it SEEMS as if many academics have gone from the idea that rich capitalists run everything to the idea that certain hegemonic ideas run everything . . .
I have no idea what I’m talking about, so why don’t I stop there.
Anyway, after all this time, I still don’t get it.
Marxism is dead; take my word for it.
But people dumped Marxism and moved to fervent belief in the New Deal, I guess.
You might want to take a look at Cass Sunstein (law professor at U. of Chicago).
I think he might actually be summing up where the “smart left” has gone.
He argues that FDR created a “second constitution,” and that conservatives are attempting to dismantle the second constitution (I think he’s mostly right about that).
Sunstein thinks that’s bad.
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’S Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever by Cass R. Sunstein
I stumbled across this guy in my travels; my husband has never heard of him.
I have a feeling that Hillary Clinton may be influenced by Sunstein. Have you noticed that she’s constantly talking about the New Deal and how George Bush is trying to dismantle the New Deal and how Democrats have to protect the New Deal and whatnot?
After I discovered Sunstein I realized she may be drawing on a whole school of thought amongst legal scholars that the rest of us have never heard of.
It’s possible.
Autocratic regimes aren’t all the same (all bad)and neither are domocracies (all good). I’we seen some democracies that were terrible, chaotic, corrupt, irresponsible, profligate, and some autocratic regimes that were relatively responsible, coherent, orderly and benign, i.e. not too brutal.
So this dichotomy autocratic=bad vs. democratic=good – is far too simple minded and unrealistic.
Some countries may advance from economic developement to democracy, while others may go the other way. It’s not necessary that one theory fits all, we have to judge each case on it’s own merit.
For example: I think China is doing a reasonable job of advancing and progressing. It’s not democratic, but it seems to me – neither horribly brutal – and it is builing up it’s economy nicely. On the other hand we have Venezuela, where a populist-marxist wrecker maintains power with the help of a valid electoral process and proceeds to destroy the country.
What is needed in Iraq isn’t necessarily a democracy, but any regime that would be stable, in control, and benign – i.e. not too brutal inside and not aggressive towards it’s neighbours. Trouble is – seems that is a pipe dream, and only a real brutal s.o.b. like Saddam could hold all those crazies together. I don’t know what will happen in Iraq, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be a democracy, and I’m not sure at all it will be benign.
Chuck, no, he was not a pragmatist. I am merely employing here one of Stephen Maturinís (from Patrick OíBrian’s Aubrey/Maturin series) favorite insults. I believe that Maturin also called Rousseau ìa begetter of false babiesî because Rousseau forced his mistress to abandon all their babies to the orphanage, while loftily writing on virtues of domesticity and raising children.
Re tragedy of Africa and culpability of socialist intellectuals: you are right.
Knucklehead,
When at war, one needs to fight, of course. I supported the invasion of Iraq because I thought that the region needed to good shaking up and wanted to see the end of Saddam. Further, I think the occupation is not going so badly, though it is hard to tell.
Even so, I think there are valid arguments to be made on the other side. Could the resources used in the war and occupation have been better used elsewhere? Did we really want to deal with the civil chaos that would result from overthrowing the established order? Would a decent form of government take root? Some people I respect raised these questions, and I think it would be frivolous of me to just blow them off.
ìMarxism is dead; take my word for it.î
Yes, now they call the same philosophy Transnational Progressivism.
Mark Polling
Right—–not that I know anything about that, either.
Apparently there is a huge & vast body of historical (and I assume theoretical) work on modernization theory, and it is universally agreed that the concept is a disaster. (Take my summary with a grain of salt, since this is all new to me.)
Katherine
Milton Friedman now says that rule of law is more important than economic liberty in moving a country forward out of povery.
I believe this.
“Marxism is dead; take my word for it.î
The idea of class struggle is alive and well. It is entrenched in the Democratic party, viz., Kerry’s two Americas.
Katherine
It’s not callous at all; that’s what the authors are arguing in favor of doing.
Which brings me to Knucklehead and Left in Texas: from what I understand, the Bush administration has routinely shut out the experts—and these were experts that should not have been shut out.
There’s a group of people now whose job, focus, expertise, you-name-it is nation-building & specifically the promotion of democracy. A lot of those people went to Iraq on their own & have risked their lives to work with the folks there.
Anyone who’s read my posts knows that I think you need to keep an eye on the experts, but I also respect experts and want to hear what they have to say, and I certainly want them involved in what we’re doing.
I read a terrific piece in FT about the “Wisdom of the Crowd” idea.
He said he believes crowds of ordinary people are smarter than experts, but he noticed that on his flight back to England everyone wanted to leave the flying up to the pilot. No one wanted to poll the passengers.
He said that with experts, as with crowds, you should assume there is a “wisdom of the crowd of experts,” which is what patients do when they get a second or a third opinion.
I do that all the time.
I look to see if there’s some kind of consensus among experts, in whatever field, and then I assume that if there is a consensus it has a decent chance of being correct.
If there are two or more conflicting schools of thought I throw my lot in with the one that makes the most sense to me, or I figure I don’t know enough to have an opinion.
The Bush White House seems not to have done this in the specific case of Iraq. They seem to have dismissed many or even most of the experts on Iraq, on nation-building, and on democracy-promotion.
They also seem not to have dismissed military expertise in the specific case of how many troops to send to Iraq.
As far as I can tell the consensus within the military was Shinsekis’ estimate of 400,000 troops. (It was 400,000, right?)
After Shinseki gave this figure to Congress, which he was legally required to do, the White House immediately announced his retirement, which would not happen for, I believe, one year hence.
He was made into a lame duck, and military leaders were left to draw the appropriate conclusion.
(This is according to Larry Diamond, but I assume many others would confirm.)
Cain,
To send the fastest, most direct message to those folks, you start with a blockade/siege operation. Anything less is backing away from the raison d’etre.
Knucklehead
Actually Europe has all kinds of resources, up to and including money, they could be committing to Iraq.
We’re letting them off the hook far too easily. (By ‘we’ I mean we here on this blog. I have no idea if Europe can be arm-twisted into putting their shoulders to the wheel. But I for one hold them responsible for doing as little as they are doing. They could be doing much more.)
Hmm.
I think Michael O’Hanlon has an op-ed on this.
I’ll check.
I just found one op-ed, but I remember another that talked about the kind of manpower they have that we don’t.
For instance, France has a large paramilitary police force, which is EXACTLY what you need in a place suffering terrorist attacks.
Do we see any of those guys in Iraq?
No, we do not.
Do we see France training any Iraqis to become paramilitary police officers?
No, we do not.
Here’s a portion of one of O’Hanlon’s columns:
http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/20040815.htm
Katherine & everyone
re: starvation
Left in TX,
It seems to me that the answer to “stabilizing” Iraq after the war was not to put more soldiers in harm’s way; e.g., more boots on the ground. Each additional one just makes the environement more target rich in assymetric warfare.
More troops do not directly equate to fewer suicide bombers, EIDs, mortar attacks et al. Notice more Iraqis are being killed by the terroists, becuase they know they get killed when dealing with coalition forces.
Past pluperfect – Now, if you’re only answer for stabilization was to have put more troops on the ground, then Kerry would have had to do this from the gitgo. He never suggested that; in fact he wants to lower the number in country…as if Bush doesn’t.
So, I think that “bad stategy” approach don’t hunt.
Nobody knows how to deal with a situation like Iraq. All of us are in the learning phase.
Chuck
By Marxism I mean the idea that capitalism is going to inevitably give way to Communism because of its internal contradictions.
No one believes that.
Everyone believes capitalism has won.
It’s possible Democrats are now where the first generation neocons were in the 1970s.
Didn’t Irving Kristol write an essay he called “Two Cheers for Capitalism”?
It was one of those guys.
I think it’s fair to say that while all left-liberals (and probably just about all “leftists” here in America) believe that capitalism has won, they still think capitalism is an incredibly difficult and even cruel system to live under.
You see phrases like “capitalism red in tooth and claw” in European writings on American capitalism.
I think many Democrats, liberals, leftists, etc. believe that capitalism has won, but it is a cruel system, and the purpose of government is to protect private citizens from its arbitrary and cruel nature.
Catherine.
I came to believe that, too. We can observe all those real life experiments taking place in Eastern Europe.
Take Poland: it is country well familiar with democratic process, as it used to elect its Kings while the rest of Europe was in grips of absolutism (the voting base was anybody with landed property, except for peasants). And yet, the current corruption there is staggering and respect for laws minimal. In fact, the main reason my close friend over there wanted Poland join EU was hope that it will become less so as a member.
On the other hand, economic liberalization over there is not as great as one would wish. They are still strangled with socialist ideas and endless, mindless regulations.
Catherine,
Thank you for the quote. I somehow always forget this guy’s name.
Katherine
Again, this is a new area for me, but I’m guessing that historically what you probably see is that without liberty there is no democracy.
I think (don’t know) that democracy without liberty takes you instantly to the “one man, one vote, one time” moment.
This will sound rude, but what the hell: I think every last liberal Democrat in the country should drop whatever they’re doing at the moment and take a course in macroeconomics.
Capitalism is your friend.
OK, trying not to be rude now (and btw I do realize that there are LIBERAL ECONOMISTS out there!)
A lot of the most-wrong ideas I had as a liberal stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have the first clue about economics.
I still don’t have the second or third clue, but I’m working on it.
I also don’t have a sense, yet, of what makes a liberal economist liberal and a conservative economist conservative: I don’t understand the argument those two groups are having with each other, or the nature of the evidence each side is working from.
But I have absorbed the basic concept of the market, and of the fact that there is no free lunch.
Once you’ve got that much, I think you’re forced to become less self-righteously liberal (though here I have to ask: what the hell is going on with Paul Krugman? And why is Brad DeLong’s blog as obnoxious as it is?)
THE NEW YORKER has a good article on Bob Shrum.
Turns out the guy is intensely interested in religion, and his wife has a degree from Yale School of Divinity.
He has no kids himself (wife has one from a previous marriage) & he doesn’t drive.
When you go into his house, his bookshelves are filled with books on Popes.
No history, no ecnomics, not even any psychology or self-help, it seems.
That, to me (getting rude here again) summed up what has driven me away from the Democratic Party.
There’s just not enough real world content.
It’s all moralizing and disapproving and being disgusted by this and ashamed of that. (e.g.: it’s “shameful” that the U.S. is “the only Western Country” that does not have national healthcare. This is a standard line. So . . . uh . . . is it shameful that Canada has 6 month waiting lists for surgery? I ask you!)
Catherine,
How do you know whether a consensus of experts represents a pooling of knowledge or a pooling of ignorance? How many generations of Aristotelian astronomers continued to look at the sun as the center of the universe?
Anyone who looks at the ME and Islam and does not identify the fact that basic inequality between believer and nonbeliever is not only enshrined but encoded in the belief and the legal system is not going to get much of a hearing from me. I really don’t care how many years of study they have spent on the ME, if they don’t present that fact right in front then whatever theory that proceeds from their consummate knowledge is going to be as wrong as Aristotelian astronomy. In the modern west the premise of democracy rests upon equality. “All men are created equal” has a meaning in the west that simply does not exist within Islam. Talking around that fact or ignoring it completely is just a polite fiction.
Catherine,
At least in principle, it is possible for an authoritarian government to act on liberal principles and for democracy to wield totalitarian powers. I donít know how often it worked in the past, but one may argue that under Shah there was some modicum of liberty in Iran, though the political system was not quite democratic.
I like your slogan; I know it full well that Capitalism is my friend
And now I am going away to reread my copy of The Constitution of Liberty.
Katherine
If you haven’t read Paul Johnson’s little book Intellectuals, I think you would enjoy it. It gives details on Rousseau’s problems with not wanting to take responsibility for his children.
I think some of the points you raise about property rights and the rule of law (two things which are not necessarily the same thing) are true. The fundamental concepts that a) law will rule, not strongmen, b) everyone will be equal before the law, and c) people are innocent until proven guilty are all cultural beliefs we owe to the Romans.
All
I commend you on a very interesting discussion today. I don’t think anyone, including Bush, would have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now about the WMDs. It’s far from clear at this point what happened to them.
I don’t personally buy the criticism that the neocons are running everything in their secret cabal. I do think the neocons have a point about democracy but it’s far from clear exactly what “imposing democracy” means. There are after all a number of different phenomena which constitute our political/economic “system” and it’s far from clear which of them are dependent on the others. They include the rule of law, an impartial court system, personal property rights, the concept of natural rights which government cannot alienate, liberty, capitalism, low-level state socialism, democracy, and don’t forget the Electoral College(!), long may it live. It’s very hard to know which of these are necessary and which superfluous.
Bertrand Russell once wrote an interesting essay after having read a book which thoroughly surveyed the methods of government in the various Greek city-states. He pointed out that they in essence constituted a plethora of real-life experiments in different forms of government. He noted that the Greeks were very skeptical of democracy in its pure form. They believed that it inevitably led, a la Chavez or Huey Long, to populism and dictatorship. The American system is not a pure democracy and was set up to avoid this particular problem among many others.
Democracy in the West was only very recently what we think of as democracy. In its modern form it began among the tribes of N. Europe who elected their king (as in Poland fairly recently). It spread to parliaments–councils of powerful warlords–among which the one in England eventually grabbed power for itself and committed regicide. Only powerful males had a vote at first. Heads of tribes and clans, in essence. Gradually, but very slowly, other groups were given rights. It may be that trying to impose democracy on a country in the form we experience it at the moment in America will be unworkable. It may be that it takes time to evolve to our present system, and it might behoove us to start with something simpler.
Christianity deserves some credit in the mix here somewhere too because it spread the idea that everybody was equal in the eyes of God, rich or poor, Slav or Roman, male or female, and eventually that fundamental concept led to the subconscious belief that everybody deserves a say in the government.
chuck
I agree that WWI killed France; WWII likewise killed Britain and Germany. I seem to agree with you about a lot of things (what was you mathematical area, btw?). But isolationism?? Please. No frickin way.
Catherine,
A hyper-focused New Deal – in other words Eruo style welfare states. Essentially this idea puts the citizens of the developed nations as wards of the state and the less developed nations as wards of the developed nations. They’ve given up Marxism, perhaps, but now they are after state, preferrably by global government or, better yet, Council of Intellectual Elders imposed egalitarianism.
Catherine:
Perhaps it is my experience in farming but I have limited belief in experts.
I do not subscribe to the Bush did not listen to the experts theory, the truth is he did not listen to the right experts. He was and is surrounded by self styled socalled experts all day and every day and I am sure he has had not shortage of experts giving him advice 24/7.
If he had followed the advice of the “if he had only listened to us club” I think we would be hearing from an entirely different group of experts complaining about an entirely different set of problems.
This attitude comes from unrealistic expectations and an over reliance on academia as a practical solver of problems. Often as not they are not. All Bush can do is try to learn from past mistakes and be prepared for future ones.
Nor do I think Europe will send troops. Why should they? The Balkans was in their interests and without us they would not have dealt with it.
They have ceased to believe in the military. They feel it is an admission of failure in diplomacy to even rely on such things. They lack both the will and the means. And besides after they have said a couple of hundred times that they won’t do it we should take their word for it rather than believe some nonsense from John Kerry.
Women are risking life and limb to vote in Afghanistan. Why is this important? Well to begin with equal rights for women tends to result in a healthier and more literate society and that means a higher standard of living.
Democracy for these countries will not be like America. They have their own cultures and that will not change. But democracy means rule of law and minority rights.
If we can not stand for this why bother to have any international institutions? Why even discuss things like human rights and world health and famine? These should be basic rights of all people, without them the notion of international law is useless.
Wow, gang, great discussion. The thing I like most about Roger’s Place is that you guys and gals never let anyone rest with their Cheirshed Notions or remain Blissfully Ignorant. Echo Chamber my ass! If you guys and gals are all saying the same thing and starting to echo, people should listen. Its gonna take two hours to catch up to this thread (I hate you, Catherine! I mean that in the good way, of course. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to cover so much territory so damn quickly. I gotta tell you a few stories someday that convinced me that I wasn’t afraid of anything and I’d go anywhere on a whim. You’ve put that idiocy back where it belongs. You are a Force of Nature. If I ever again find myself standing somewhere with that sinking feeling that the stuff is about to hit the fan, I want you and the rest of Roger’s Bitchin’ Broads nearby. (At least that way I know I’ll probably get adequate first response.)
R C Dean,
I’ve jest reread your post above and I suspect we are on very nearly the very same page. We can no longer afford “benign neglect”. The Cold War and prior situation of power blocks has broken down. All kinds of ugliness is streaming in to fill this power vacuum. It was never really accurate that the US became a hyper-power. What happened was the US was 1/2 of the “balance of power” with which pieces of the world were loosely aligned, leashed, tethered, whatever. When the Soviet Union went belly-up the teeter-totter stopped teeter-tottering an we were left as the last “fit man standing”. All this crap we’re seeing now was stuff that was out there, but now can make a play for power. Iran could not even have fathomed itself as a world power prior to the fall of the SU. Now it can, provided it can do some real damage to the US – by proxy if necessary. France is in the same situation. Places like Yemen and Sudan “didn’t matter” 15 years ago – they were pawns on the chessboard. Now they are rabid little Monty Python Killer Rabbits.
I gotta come back to the rest later… Oh, never mind. The “What relatives are you willing to spend?” question is a false one. I would be sickened to the point of death if I lost a child in this or any other war (or any other way). I’ve long suspected, having seen close friends go through it, that burying one’s child has to be one of the worst pains one can experience. But their lives are not ours to give or deny. They choose, either way, not us. Part of my intense hatred for the Islamomurderers is that they don’t accept this choice. They train their children to die by killing. I hate them with such a passion that it makes me rethink my agnostic position. I seriously think about accepting religion so that I may beg forgiveness for the the unbounded hatred I feel for those murdering scum. Oops, sorry, I got carried away.
Hey folks — I admit I’ve sort of fallen down on my responsibilities this week (I had to do the work I get paid for, sadly), but if this isn’t a dead thread already, I’ve got a couple of questions:
(1) Can we point to any example of a country in which the “rule of law” as we normally think about it isn’t associated with relatively great economic liberty?
(2) can we point to any examples of places with liberty that aren’t more or less effective democracies?
I honestly wonder if this isn’t an “angels on pinheads” sort of question: I’m not sure that we can really separate the three concepts of personal liberty, a rule of law over personal influence or political power, and economic liberty.
Charlie:
What relatives? Is this like the question that Moore ask about sacrificing your child for Fallujah?
Well my cousins Kristoffer and Dmitri went to Iraq. My family has sent people to fight in just about every damn war this country has ever been in, including the Revolution. Some of them survived, some did not. But they were not children, they were men.
We don’t sacrifice children, the enemy does.
WichitaBoy,
Kennan: This is difficult to say in a few words. I feel that we are greatly overextended. We claim to be able to do more than we really can do for other people. We should limit our contributions, and let others take the initiative.
I’m close to the isolationists, but not entirely, because I’ve always recognized that those alliances to which we belong and which the Senate has approved as provided for by the Constitution, we must remain faithful to those. That includes the original NATO alliance, our alliance with Japan. Our complicated relations with Latin America contain elements of long-term assurances, in the Monroe Doctrine sense.
Beyond that, when other countries come to us asking for help, we should ask, “Why do you need it?” and “Why should we provide it?”
Within our time, I don’t think that democracy is going to be the universal form of government. I’m very hesitant about our pushing democracy and human rights on other countries, whose democracy in any case would be rather different from our own. We can’t ask other countries to be clones of America.
I find a certain appeal in Kennan’s sentiment. He sort of pushes the idea of doing the least necessary to protect our interests. Clearly, the man who conceived the Marshall plan is no isolationist in the strict sense. But even in the Marshall plan, he was careful that the Europeans should do much of the planning and have a stake in the outcome.
As to mathematics, I went back to school as an ancient of 47 after skipping math as an undergraduate, so I just had fun in the standard subjects: Algebra, Topology, Analysis, PDE. I was probably the best student in all my classes, which surprised me no end. After comps the department became annoyed with me, as I just flitted about like a fly in a candy shop, little logic and set theory (no one in the department did it), oddball subjects like nonstandard analysis. I ended up doing a dissertation using a variant of Kurzweil integration and decompositions of unity to develop vector measures, just sort of to see how it worked out. No one in the department really did that either, although in retrospect it looks like part of geometric measure theory. At my age, mathematics is more like art appreciation and a hobby than a vocation.
Charlie, I am sorry I meant to direct that to Knucklehead.
Catherine,
I’m never going to get around to reading this Sunstein character. But FDR’s New Deal created a vast array of “unwritten rules and expectations” that we are struggling to deal with. We can’t have a Second Constitution regardless of how good or bad it is. If there is such a thing it needs to be put in play for We the People to discuss and articulate and hammer out and enter into the one and only Constitution. I suspect that the Left’s foaming response to any challenge to their Judiciary Usurpation schemes is a response to this conservative challenge to this nebulous, unwritten Second Constitution.
Geeze, you really are a pain, Catherine.
Knucklehead
OK, I think that’s fair. And balanced.
(Seriously, though, it’s something along those lines.)
Terrye
I have a healthy farmer skepticism of experts myself, but no way do I reject experts & expertise.
Like the man said: everyone wants the pilot to fly the plane.
Also, the minute you have a major problem, unfixable problem in your life, like 2 kids with autism, you need experts. Period. That’s why I spent 7 years of my life raising money to fund autism research.
There are about a zillion parents out there trying to treat their autistic children with diet, and they may be onto something (Temple says they are).
But around here, we need a cure.
As my friend down around Washington says, “If the Chinese didn’t come up with a cure for autism in 10,000 years of Eastern medicine, there isn’t one.”
Back on-topic, if you think back, Roger hinted around that Ledeen’s daughter didn’t have a lot of positive things to say about the CPA. That was pretty clear.
Other people I trust, like Larry Diamond or Ralph Peters, also don’t have a lot of positive things to say about the post-war period.
I haven’t yet read Fallows’ piece about all the planning the Bushies ignored, but I’ve met him, and I know his work, and I trust him, too.
This is one area where I’m pretty sure that once I have read enough diverse and non-lying sources on this subject I’m going to agree with the Bush-dissed-the-experts perception.
Terrye,
My comment re: the relatives question was a response to the Rick Ballard/RC Dean exchange miles above. And while I don’t believe for one second that Rick posed it in the same spirit and intent that Michael Moore does, yes, it is the same question.
“Are you willing to give your son’s life to make Iraq a democracy?” is a false question. As a parent it may seem like a legit question, but the life belongs to the son, not the parent. There was a report of a women at the Bush’s National Gurad speech who screamed that Bush was responsible for her son’s death in Iraq. As much as I understand where she is coming from, she is wrong. Her son made his choice to be part of the NG. The POTUS, who happens to be Bush at the moment, made his choice to deploy troops. Neither of those decisions were this mother’s to make. She is merely left with the irrational pain – a consequence of other people’s decisions, none of which were her’s to make.
I probably failed to answer your question.
Rick B
There are a couple of answers to that.
The first answer is that in many cases you don’t know.
That’s why we have “paradigm shifts,” and that’s been one of the challenges for the neocons; they’re introduced a paradigm shift, or they’ve tried to.
People are resisting.
If I can sound boastful for a second, I was involved in creating one & perhaps even two paradigm shift myself. In my early days with NAAR, the entire world believed that autism was a lifelong disability, a birth defect of the brain.
When I & a few others began talking about finding a cure we were seen as simply nuts. Nice folks, well-meaning, but nuts.
So today, just a few years later, the idea that autism is a brain disorder that will one day be cured is commonplace.
(The awful irony of this is that in changing the paradigm we undermined some incredibly important non-medical, behavior research . . . . and that is a story for another day. But talk about your unintended consequence.)
The second answer, in my own case, and probably in other people’s cases as well, is that as a nonfiction writer–let’s just use the word “journalist”–I seem to have developed a knack, or skill, for “picking winners.”
Frequently I’ll dive into a field, get a sense of the warring parties, and decide where I think things will come out . . . and later on I’ll find I was right.
I’ve been thinking about this lately: is this a normal skill for a competent journalist?
I’m sure I developed it through nonfiction writing, so I wonder if other writers develop it after awhile, too.
At this point, my friends and family “know me” for this skill.
A few months back my sister was thinking about diet and weight loss, and I kept telling her she had to read some book I’d bought because I thought it looked interesting and important.
Finally she said, “I don’t want to read the book. I want you to read it and tell me what’s in it.”
She wasn’t being lazy; she figured I was going to see something in it she didn’t.
So I’m answering your question personally and generally.
Right . . . well, people who are not fans of George Bush say exactly this.
Then they get called “racist” for saying Arabs might not be the most promising candidates for democracy.
Knucklehead
Wow!
Thank you!
Knucklehead:
For the mothers there is never a good enough reason. Normandy, Iwo Jima were not good enough reasons. Their grief is boundless.
Catherine:
I understand your meaning and I did not intend to be so cavalier.
I don’t doubt mistakes were made, my point is they always are. But it is a mistake to think that simply a change in tactics or personnel could change the ultimate fact that Iraq is a very messed up place with a disintegrating infrastructure, a traumatized and distrustful population, a well trained and armed terrorist network ready to kill Americans long before the 4th ID got to Baghdad and a corrupt bunch of cronies circling like vultures.
These things did not exist because of a lack of expertise, it was jsut the way it was.
We could just as easily argue that if we had not messed around with teh UN for months and had got the show on the road there would have been less time to disperse and hide arms as well bring in Arab terrorists to fight. The question if we could do it again would not be to deal with al Sadr sooner but to keep the little maniac out of the country altogether.
I work in health care and I know about experts but I also know there is nothing they can’t complicate and screw up.
I had a client who had spent 36 months in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He ahd a huge scar from a bullet wound he managed to survive. he saw 17,000 Americans killed [including nurses] in the Phillipines. To this day he will not vote Democrat because he felt the mistakes made in the Phillipines were so atrocious as to be criminal. Those mistakes were made by some of the great military experts of their time.
To be an expert in autism is one thing, to be an expert in war is something else.
But I do love your mind.
WichitaBoy
Wow!
Great post.
Catherine (yet again),
Dang is this thread hard to keep up with.
Expertise vs. “collective wisdom” is always an issue. Sometimes The Crown is smarter than the expert, sometimes we need to leave matters to the experts (the plane being a good example). And if there is a crowd about to get violent and riot, I’d generally give deference to the experts in crowd control.
But we have something of a Cult of Expertise here in the US that is often problematic. Given normal circumstances, for example, one doesn’t need to read 20 books about parenting to be a decent parent. In fact, consulting too much expertise can invite failure in the job at hand. Or, perhaps, we tend to rely on the “credentialed expert” rather that the “true expert” (i.e, consulting Dr. Thusandsuch rather than Grandma). We defer too often to experts, IMO, in areas where we should be asking ourselves the difficult questions and trying our best to find reasonable answers.
In the case of Iraq, what are the limits of the “experts”? Iraq was controlled by the Baathist regime for something on the order of 35 years with Saddam running that show for 25 or more years. If that gets torn down existing expertise goes with it. Everything old is suddenly new again. Much of what the experts knew no longer has foundations. There are people who are “expert” in “traversing the unkown” – somehow they figure out how to manage in situations where the rules have been suspended or destroyed, the game board overturned, the score erased and the equipment burned or thrown over the wall. There are other experts who figure out the minute details of that which is stable and can tell us where to place one’s foot for every step – provided nobody bulldozed the path or no story washed out the bridge.
What is expertise? Does expertise have a shelf life?
Witchita!
Paul Johnson has a little book!?!? I bet even Catherine didn’t know that. You officially go onto my Wall of Fame.
Terrye
You weren’t cavalier!
Sorry—I didn’t mean to whip out my Two Autistic Kids as a “cheat” to win an argument!
I think what I’m trying to say about Iraq is that I’ve now read enough diverse people to trust that things could be better than they are now, and perhaps significantly better than they are.
I certainly don’t know this, and I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.
But I’ve reached the “tipping point” I mentioned earlier, where I’ve heard the same thing from enough different people, including people who are pro-Iraq war, pro-George Bush, etc., that I’m convinced.
I don’t think, personally, (and I don’t know whether anyone thinks this) that everything would be “fine” or “getting close to fine,” etc. if the Bushies had used the plans they actually made.
But . . . . here’s an example.
I think it’s possible Fallujah would not now be a “terrorist city-state” if we’d stomped it in those early weeks before we got all fussy about international opinion (forget who I heard this from—Ralph Peters? Someone like that.)
Seems like there was a window of Fallujah-stomping opportunity we missed back there.
My Source Memory is completely gone tonight . . . but somebody somewhere was talking about things we need to do going forward–oh!
Joe Biden in the WSJ.
I didn’t manage to Read the Whole Thing, though I will, but one recommendation he was making was that the world needs to put together a standing force of, I believe, military police, ready to go into any chaotic post-war situation and patrol the streets.
That sounded good to me.
I know, I know . . . “international military police” is gonna mean us.
Still, as I understand it “military police” is a different function, with different training, than “marines” or “army.”
I guess where I’ve come down is: the next time we invade someone I want 400,000 guys storming the place.
Plus another 400,000 M.P.s right behind.
Knucklehead
Probably.
I was kind of horrified when I encountered that title.
“Second Constitution.”
Boy.
Charlie
I know that part of the two questions, and mentioned it earlier: you can have “liberalism” without “democracy.”
Liberal monarchies like England are the example.
Not sure whether there are any such countries now (though China is liberalizing it’s economy without becoming democratic.)
Anyway, liberalism, or a liberal order, is definitely different from democrac
I’m gonna see if I can find out the answer to the first.
Catherine,
I truly doubt that they say exactly that. The problem is not one of race but of fundamental differences in world view that will not be resolved by ignoring them. The Turkish system is a democracy that has been functional (more or less) for 80 years. It may continue to function and it may fold within the next 10 years. Religious pressure will be the proximate cause of failure should it collapse.
The experiment in democracy in Iraq may work or it may fail, we won’t know for a very long time. We can be reasonably certain of failure, however, if no steps are taken to break both the Wahabi’s in Arabia and the mullahs in Iran. I am not against the experiment in Iraq but I am not cheerful at all about the prospect for success. If there was some clarity as to the next step outside of Iraq then I might change my opinion.
Frankly, as long as we retain basing rights in Iraq, it is worth the effort.
Jerry,
I’m going to join you out on that KaiserFascist plank. The best thing that could have happened for the world would have been no WWI. A reasonably good argument can be made that the next best thing that could have happened would have been a German victory. The Kaiser was a dickhead but not an asshole. France was, as always, engaged in perfidy. The Bolsheviks barely had a solid toehold going in Russia.
Have you read Goodspeed’s The German Wars or Kissinger’s Diplomacy? Kissinger would NEVER suggest such a conclusion, but its a fascinating read, partly because it discusses characters like Bismark from a Kissingerian viewpoint. I’m not defending Kissinger (I remain undecided re: him), but he understood the global power game – one of Catherine’s experts (just funnin’ Cate!)
Rick Ballard,
One of the flaws many people seem, IMHO, to have is that they don’t recognize anything between “success” and “failure”. When one has some problem that needs to be solved one should always have some vision of what “success”, in its purest form, will look like. And one should have the corresponding vision of what failure will look like. Somewhere between those two extremes is a “break even” point where the investment was neither a success or a failure. This point is not necessarily the midpoint. It may be closer to one extreme or the other.
In the case of Iraq
is, we apparently agree, somewhere on the “success” side of the “break even” point. If all we get out of this is military bases from which to dominate the region, then it was “worth it”. This sounds, in one of the Ladies Phrases, callous, but we are in and existential war and bases close to the enemy are good things.
Catherine:
Well Fallujah is one of those war of the experts things in which case they probably should have just turned the Marines loose and sent AlJazeera packing.
But after 750 dead Iraqis and AlJazeera going nuts we were told by other experts that we were wearing our welcome really thin and that if we continued to kill people it could get ugly all over, namely Najaf. That is what I mean. My Grandma used to call it too many cooks in the kitchen.
Wretchard had an intersting point about this. He said Fallujah was a learning experience. I think he is right about that.
But the problem with the 400,000 men is that we could not move in what we had fast enough because the Turks would not let us come in from the north. So I doubt if we could have gotten to the places quickly enough initially to stop the looting and chaos. I also wonder if more men would have been more targets. Perhaps more people trained for law enforcement or crowd control would have helped but my cousins are soldiers, they are not trained to conduct traffic or deal with rock throwing teenagers.
I am getting a bit piss off with people that say that Singapore is not a democracy. How do you define what a democracy is? Don just listen to a 80s (I believe this was said in the 87) clown that said Singapore is Disneyland in a Police State.
Do we hold elections, sure we do, do the U.S. hold elections , they do.
Do we have a free press, sure. Can we publish whatever we like, sure, can the U.S., they do. (However, of course if they were to slander, my governement will sued your pants off. However, I would say the court system is pretty balance as a whole.)
Do we have free speech, sure, just not religious or racist slurs (or you get sued your pants off). U.S., yah.
We have the internal security act, U.S. have the Patroit Act.
Do we have communists locked up (particular 1 with my namesake) without judicial process, sure, but that was years ago. And the U.S. has Guantanomo Bay.
Well, to paraphrase Zell Miller, get out of my and my countrie’s face.
Ps: You know, I think, some of what is said about egypt, indonesia and malaysia, and a whole lot of other countries, is just plain slander on the part of the flower power people (leftist).
Oh yes, Charles Krauthammer had an interseting point on Fallujah some time back. He called it island hopping. From WW2 I believe. If I understood him correctly the idea was to not get bogged down on one island, but to isolate individual areas and apply pressure until the right moment to strike.
I think I have this right. But after awhile all this stuff just kind of blends together if you know what I mean and I am too damn lazy to look it up.
Seow:
Hey if you are happy who am I too disagree?
Seow:
Wellcome aboard. I always feel strange expressing opinions about other countries when no nationals are around to set me straight, or at least put up an argument. So in this discussion, the more the better.
Seow,
How much pro muslim sentiment is to be found among the Malay population in Singapore? How is it expressed?
Liberty Webster Dictionary-The state of a free person; exemption from subjection to the will of another claiming ownership of the person or services; freedom; – opposed to slavery, serfdom, bondage, or subjection.
–
Liberty is a state of existence and not defined by systems. Different systems have different challenges and effects ones liberties. Our own nation as hopeful as it was from the beginning, allowed for Slavery, so Slavery existed in a Democracy, be sure that Slaves held few if any liberties. The Monarch of a Kingdom may have more liberty than you or I. In caste systems like India, liberties are as rainbows in the sky, varying with equal spectrum of differences, and unlike here the chance for chance dire. The true gift our founding Fathers gave us was the right to chose to create civil rights and correct the wrongs in our system. With this also comes responsibility as we can chose the opposite, we may chose to sell our liberties for things we ought not, there is a balance.
On the opposite end of socialism is anarchy, or the absence of a well organized government, in some ways this can threaten Liberty much more than Socialism. This is why England and France are freer then Afghanistan or Pakistan, the former being overly socialistic, the later overly anarchistic.
The Jews were warned against overly desiring Kings and were admonished to have Judges instead. The Jews in their ill placed desires chose to have Kings and suffered for it. In America we can chose to have big government that is overreaching, on the other hand be too much libertarianism and invite anarchy, both may or may not threaten Liberty. A balance is tough to find. There will always be libertarians crying against a controlling protective state during wartime, and there will always be socialists crying for more government during peace and prosperity.
Last but not least, all religions, one way or another, teaches us that spiritual liberty can be achieved through faith, and peace of mind. I will gladly add that here in America we blend the two aspects, both spiritual and temporal liberty, as well as any society, and for that I am indeed grateful.
This may be the Roger’s Place’s Greatest Thread Yet but I’m running out of gas. As I run out of gas, however, one of my knuckleheaded moments of rock thunking upon rock in the largely empty space between my ears happened. I refer to these moments as, vaguely speaking, Knuklehead’s Game Theories.
I’ll begin, oddly enough, with a very strange date in world history. That date is 1492. Apparently the Islamomurderers see that date as the year Andalusia was lost. We westerners, particulary Americans, see it as the date when the Father of all War Criminals, Christopher Columbus, discovered the New World and set in motion all of the Really Big Problems we face today.
There’s a Dirty Little Secret, an unwritten rule, in the world of business. In short it is the If the game is important and you can’t win it according to the Rules of Play, change the rules. Stated another way, this is the I’m losing. I can’t live with that. I need to kick the table over rule.
On 9/11/2001 Osama bin Laden thought he had changed the rules and created enough chaos to turn the game in his favor. George W. Bush, POTUS, took one look at the situation at hand and said (I apologize in advance for the vulgarity), “Sorry about that shit, asshole, but you missed and this is how one kicks over the fucking table! Now I’m making up the rules as we go, not you.”
There’s no chart, no maps. Columbus may have thought he had a plan, but he didn’t. His plan amounted to nothing more than Sail West and Hope We Live Through This While Finding Something Valuable.
No plan survives the first incident of opposition. Some people see that as a ready made excuse for failed plans. Jonah Goldberg over at The Corner made an interesting observation about John Kerry today. He wondered whether Kerry was a “flip-flopper” or, a subtle difference, one of those people who views any opposition to any plan as evidence of a Bad Plan and, therefore, wants a New Plan to replace the Failed Plan.
There is no Plan for Winning the Peace. We’ll figure that out when we win the war. The war requires destroying the cesspool that breeds the insanity of Islamomurderers. There’s no simple solution, no magic wand to wave, no Brilliant Plan Guaranteed to Succeed. The table has been kicked over. The rules no longer apply. Osama bin Laden and the Islamomurderers are not making the rules up as we go – George Bush is.
I’m glad it isn’t Al Gore who is faced with the problem of playing the game by OBL’s rules or making the rules up on the fly. He is not capable of playing that game well. I hope (if I were religious I’d pray) that we don’t turn the Making Up of This War’s Rules As We Go to John (god help us!) F’in Kerry.
Good night all. You are one challenging bunch. Thank you Roger.
Catherine
Thanks. And thanks for an absolute profusion of great posts today. I felt like I was back in grad school there for a while, taking notes.
Knucklehead
Good post. Your point is well-taken. We have to muddle through.
I think we would all do well to heed the quotation Roger graced us with at the beginning, “War is a series of catastrophes that results in victory.” (Thanks for that, Roger.) I don’t know if that’s true in general but it certainly describes very accurately the shenanigans of the Civil War.
Undoubtedly the Bush team has made lots of mistakes and undoubtedly Fallujah was one of them but mistakes are always made in unknowable situations. Hindsight is 20/20 but it’s ridiculous to sit and wag our fingers at Bush now ex post facto. I’m with Terrye on this one, Bush gets yakked at by experts 24/7 and follows some of their advice some of the time but sometimes he kicks over the table.
But one thing I think I see is that Bush has an arrogance about him which is really off-putting to certain classes of people, certain experts who believe they’ve got the answers. No doubt Clinton would have had them all over to dinners at the White House and charmed the socks off them and carefully listened to their opinions and even quoted them in his next speech–and then would have gone his merry way doing whatever was expedient. But they would have loved him for it. Most people just want a pat on the back when you come down to it. But Bush has brought in a lot of Texans and people from the oil industry of all things (can’t you just hear it?–”my God, the nerve of that man”), the oil industry being the very embodiment of evil in the leftist pantheon since the days of Standard Oil, and he’s blown off the self-professed experts and he’s blown off the professors and he’s blown off the Ivy-leaguers and it has really p-oed them and that’s one of the sources of BDS. It’s also part of the reason the press hates him so much. He’s told them they don’t matter. It may be true, but who wants to hear it? Bush is not a great politician. But he may be that extreme rarity, a statesman.
chuck
Very interesting. I like non-standard analysis. Are you practicing these days or just dabbling?
As for isolationism, now that you have defined your terms, I guess I half agree with you. The last I checked we have troops in 135 countries. Now that seems to be a lot. It would seem to me that there might be a happy middle somewhere between 135 deployments and complete isolationism. In particular, I agree with Rumsfeld that we should pull our troops out of Germany and probably out of S. Korea as well. It’s not our job to fix all the world’s problems and I have serious doubts about Kosovo personally but there are certainly situations which require us to act, merely for our own self-defense, and I’m reluctantly of the opinion that Iraq is one of those. Iran may be one soon, too.
Oh, and Catherine I forgot to say that I do believe a cure for autism will be found despite the negative experience of 2,000 years of unscientific eastern medicine. It may not come in time for our children though. If that belief is your contribution, then thank you. Don’t forget that it was as recently as 1960 when the absolutely nonsensical refrigerator mother theory held complete sway. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Catherine & Witchita,
I do not know anything about autism. I do know, however, that I have an acquaintance who described his son as “autistic”. Roughly a little less than two years ago I happened to ask how his son was doing and he nearly went off like a Roman Candle. He’d recently sat in the vast audience of a major State U. and watched his son receive his degree. And shortly after that he’d stood in the door of his home and watched his son drive away for his first day of work. I can’t describe the incredible look on his face – heartwarming does not do it justice.
I don’t know Autistic from Learning Disabled. I know the man used the term “autistic” and considers his wife and son to be heroes. He may have whatever definitions he chooses and I am in no position to argue the finer points.
Rick Ballard
Not really sure, I can only speak for a few. An uncle and a few friends.
I would say generally (an answer to your question), that the muslims (Arab, Malay and Indian-Pakisatani and Bangladeshi), are generally more open minded than your run of the mill muslim in… say Malaysia. They tend to be more educated as well. I would like to note that lately in a few years, I seem to notice more muslim collegues wearing the shroud. Not sure what this portends to, but….
Oh, they are sending more of their kids to madrasahs as well, in India and Pakistan.
In my opinion, it is the mullahs (Osama bin laden and JI type that is, I don think that is what they call themself in Singapore, can remember) and Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya to blame. The more info they get from these sources, the more radical they seem to be. Lately with more homes with cable, there are more crazies out on the street… With the mullahs, we can always bar them from entering, but all this is just hearsay and (maybe) innuendo, so please take it with a grain of salt.
Crazies, maybe I should clarify that they are muslims with a more extreme outlook in life, like the lefties, not particularly dangerous, just opiniated.
WichitaBoy:
Are you practicing these days or just dabbling?
I would have to say just dabbling. After graduation I found that I didn’t relish the thought of starting on the academic ladder in my fifties and having to publish like mad. I also wanted a decent salary after living as a grad student, and the job market was tight. So I’m back in an engineering establishment where I operate as the house mathematical guy. My first (and only) paper out of school was on using lattice theory/tiling to analyse the antenna arrays used for ionisondes, published in Radio Science. Must say I was proud of doing something completely different from my dissertation.
I find myself a bit nostalgic for the university because I feel somewhat mathematically isolated. I also miss teaching, but not grading. A well paying job makes up for a lot
I’m sure it will reassure all of you to know that this week, gossip columnist Liz Smith officially endorsed Pat Buchanan for his brave stand against the neocon conspiracy…
The more info they get from these sources, the more radical they seem to be.
This sort of confirms the opinion I have that the media has been one of the great criminal organizations of the last century. Guardians of liberty and justice? Pfui. And before Iran, let’s take out the BBC.
Catherine –Actually Europe has all kinds of resources, up to and including money, they could be committing to Iraq.–
Have you seen the money our “allies” are pouring into their health care because it’s crap?
CA – $41 Billion loonies
Britain 6.5 B Euros or $
Frogistan $15 Bill E or $, IIRC.
Ozzies have a problem, too.
Britain does not have any money to purchase the Typhoons they ordered. I posted that yesterday at Rantburg.
We think our books don’t balance? Europe’s is worse. And they don’t have the political will yet.
They are restructuring their militaries, downsizing them.
Wichita
But one thing I think I see is that Bush has an arrogance about him which is really off-putting to certain classes of people, certain experts who believe they’ve got the answers.
In Texas that swagger is called walking, and in Texas that arrogance is called knowing what he wants to do.
I am well in understanding the demeanor Bush displays. I also understand that weaknesses and strenghts are usually manifestations of the same trait, though at different moments. Certainly what may be weaknesses may also be misunderstandings he feels is a waste of time consoling critics over, in fact he never will unless he has to.
I have said that I run a business. People of my personality type can be extremely kind, really are harmless, but can be seen as pompous and even tyrannical in the eyes of some. Bush reads people very quickly and gets real quick senses of whether someone has his interests at heart or is coming to blindly advise him. PR to him comes before the deal and after, when midstream he takes few prisoners and does not suffer fools gladly, and he is midstream at the moment, that is his judgment and no one else’s except those that see failure everywhere. I happen to not be one of those. People who see failure in fact Bush needs, but not for their vision as much as their attention to detail. Most of these people don’t get this. He recognizes this and uses them accordingly. In fact I had a few moments today with some know it all employees at work. I sought simple answers they sought to correct and council. They were reminded.
My father always hated dealing with me, yet he couldn’t make things function as well without me. He said, “I have never seen someone make so many damn mistakes in my life!” If business was a war he would have declared too many casualties. Even more strange was the one time he told me, “If I didn’t need you I’d fire you! In fact if I could find someone to do what you are doing, I’d do it now!” The only people who came along I guess where the John Kerry types, he never had the chance.
I understand Bush and that is why I like him, all the weaknesses other people see I know have a hell of a lot more to do with their own hang ups then his. The smirk, the swagger, the sway! Wichita he is a Beach master, things will only be clear to most after it is all done.
Today my fathers business is ten times bigger then when I took it over, yet I was arrogant, could have found better ways to do things… blah, blah, blah. Yet in retrospect my Father knows in 15 years I have fired very few. I have only had to go to court twice and won both cases, phenomenal in my business. I was always pushing too hard or not enough yet in the end all the expectation of the naysayers was surpassed. Bush is not arrogant to me, so People paint Bush according to their own misunderstandings or prejudices, especially people with arrogant demeaners themselves. (I am not saying you)
One last thing, Bush will never make those that need information and want to know ‘the plan’ satisfaction. And that is difficult to take but he has good reason. He knows one of the biggest truth of all, information in the hands of those with different ideas, no matter how well intentioned, always end up to undermine more then benefit. Bush uses that model. In the end blind faith with a guy like him is what is needed, and I suspect he will get it from a majority at some point because he will earn their trust to see things through. This is not a discussion of whether anyone is right or wrong, I am just stating a fact about the man people must realize.
–
One more thing however where I do strongly disagree:
Bush is not a great politician.
He is the most incredible politician I have ever witnessed and I think I will be proved further right on this. Like athletes, politicians need not need be flashy. I coach Sports and I have been in Politics, stats rarely lie. A good coach reads them, but a great coach senses and understands the intangibles. First Bush’s intangibles are way off the charts, they are only measurable by how he effects the game. How does Bush effect a game? He went into his convention tied and left with Kerry eating dust. He was 10 points down behind Gore at this point in 2000 and overcame. At midterms Zogby said, “It is amazing, wherever he campaigns his candidate has a 5 point lift in the polls.” He was the first Republican since before we were born to control all branches of government even at the state level, and he did this during a midterm when all odds said this should not be.
Let us compare where he was when he took office to where he and the Republicans are after he retires and compare it to history. I know where my bets are and this will be no accident, in fact it is why Democrats so fear him, they know in four more years he may have them boxed in ways they can’t easily overcome. I will predict more minorities in retrospect will revere him. We will see. A person who does these things is not someone who is a poor politician, that is a politician with intangibles that are over the heads of most. In short his tide will rise all boats, in some ways his genius will never be understood but it will be recognized long after he has served.
Terrye–
–Democracy for these countries will not be like America. They have their own cultures and that will not change. But democracy means rule of law and minority rights.–
Democracy for Europe isn’t like America.
And they’re the poorer for it.
Gratuitous slam and I took it. I call it “mutated monarchy.”
Ruled by the unelected 1 or the brusselsprouts, still the same.
ìThis sort of confirms the opinion I have that the media has been one of the great criminal organizations of the last century. Guardians of liberty and justice? Pfui. And before Iran, let’s take out the BBC.î
Right on, chuck. Thank you for sending me to bed laughing myself silly. Intercourse the media! My they rot in hell.
–He was the first Republican since before we were born to control all branches of government even at the state level,–
I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t have my judges. The Gang of 41.
Sandy P
Touche! Judges are not elected however, but if Dubya gets a mandate… WATCH OUT!
Wow – long thread.
Too often people discussing nation building or tinkerig give too little weight to rule of law.
In shorthand, rule of law is the inverse of corruption.
Mexico has a functioning democracy, good universities, and not much of an economy. Main reason: corruption. The risk of doing business is high, because one has to discount the chances of having to pay big bribes or losing the business entirely through a corrupt legal system.
With a lot of corruption, the economy is inherently weak. I think China will suffer some shocks because of this.
Rule of law (equal treatment under the law) is very, very important. Without it, democracy is going to be skewed, investment is dangerous, and bad things can happen to you.
John Moore
Amen. It partly touches what I was saying in an earlier post. Democracy without rule of law will descend into anarchy, which can actually be worse than socialism.
Chuck, just out of curiosity, where are you geographically?
I ask because WitchitaBoy and I work, oh, maybe 200 years apart. We could get quite a little chapter of Academics Anonymous going….
Catherine
“Then they get called “racist” for saying Arabs might not be the most promising candidates for democracy.”
Yes, but is it possible they’re putting the cart before the horse? It may very well be true that the culture of Islam is not conducive to democracy because rights of the individual don’t exist as a concept, but if given the experience of personal input into the running of their own lives along with their own economic betterment might not this concept of individualism take hold..and very strongly?
I don’t think this is on the order of ‘a miracle happens’, I think it is an empirical reality. All we have to do is look at the majority of people in Iraq who are fighting for this very opportunity. We are not losing in any sense of the word, we are winning this war over there. A guerilla war is a war of attrition and will. We’ve won Najaf and Samara and in fact it was the Iraqi’s own will that won Samara.
Right now I’m inclined to agree with anyone who says these ‘experts’ are only experts inside their own ivory towers.
Catherine
Are any of those ‘experts’ you’ve come to agree with soldiers in Iraq? Oops.
Your CW has become (1)more troops and (2)we shoulda put down Fallujah and (3) of course, the ‘experts’ knew this all along.
The experts only know this through hindsight. The general saying we needed 400,000 troops was fighting the last war. He had no special knowledge of the actual facts on the ground in Iraq at the time he decided those troop levels were necessary.
Nobody knew Saddam’s guys would fade away, disappear, only to fight another day. Nobody.
Those 400,000 troops were to fight Saddam’s army…not the guerilla war that came later.
And heed Terrye’s comment about what might be different if we hadn’t taken so long farting around at the UN first. That’s an important point that these experts haven’t even considered.
Our guys over there are learning from mistakes. And that is FAR more valuable than listening to experts and their hindsight opinons.
Fallujah may or may not have been a mistake. Whether it was or not is not important, it’s what our guys learned from it that is. And that leads directly to how we got Najaf back and Samara and are working at regaining other hot spots.
I’m afraid your experts aren’t reading letters from the guys who are actually over there. Again I call these experts to come out of their Ivory Towers and listen to the guys who have their boots on the ground and their lives at risk in Iraq every day.
I know that part of the two questions, and mentioned it earlier: you can have “liberalism” without “democracy.”Liberal monarchies like England are the example.
Gee, Catherine, doesn’t the UK have elections and a legislature and so forth. It’s been a while since I was there last, but I seem to faintly recall….
Seriously, when the House of Commons can vote to exclude the hereditary aristocracy from the House of Lords, and the Lords can’t really do anything about it, it seems like a working democracy.
200 years
yards, I meant 200 yards apart.
Charlie(C):
I’m over the mountains in Logan, Utah.
Syl:
I think you are emphasizing the active side of things. That things aren’t static, that we can make some things happen. Active situations don’t lend themselves so easily to academic analysis. And just to point out the difficulty of understanding dynamic situations, let’s take the current election right here in the good old USA. How well have the experts done in guiding and understanding the situation?
What chuck said.