Democracy is not the Answer

Not only do I believe that bringing democracy to the Middle East is an impractical idea, but I also think at this point in time it’s a bad idea that will make the U.S. less safe, peace less likely, and terrorists harder to control. We need a friendly, progressive, and liberal-minded regime in Iraq, not a democratic one. The recent election victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority lends support to this point. Hamas are the worst of the worst, complete hard-liners, addicted to the use of terrorism, with totalitarian Sharia-based domestic goals, and maximalist claims against Israel. They should not be participating in an election; they should rather be killed or be in jail.

The fact is thatin countries ranging from Pakistan to Egypt, friendly, pro-US regimes are much more likely to be nondemocratic than democratic. And the reason is simple: Lots of people for lots of reasons do not like the U.S. and do not have the same goals. Seems basic enough, but U.S. leaders continue to promote democracy as the panacea, when it has proven to be no such thing. Robert Jervis in an exellent article entitled “Why the Bush Doctrine Cannot Be Sustained” writes:

The Bush administration has also argued that other countries are much more likely to support American foreign policy objectives if they are democratic. The basic point that democracies limit the power of rulers has much to
be said for it, but it is far from clear how far this will translate into shared foreign policy goals. After all, at bottom, democracy means that a state’s policy will at least roughly reflect the objectives and values of the population, and there is no reason to believe that these should be compatible between one country and another. Why would a democratic Iraq share American views on the Arab–Israeli dispute, for example? Would a democratic Iran be a closer ally than the Shah’s regime was? If Pakistan were truly democratic, would it oppose Islamic terrorism? In many cases, if other countries become more responsive to public opinion, they will become more anti-American. In the key Arab states of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, cooperation with the United States could not be sustained if the public had greater influence; the elections in Pakistan in September of 2002 reduced the regime’s stability and complicated the efforts to combat al Qaeda, results that would have been magnified had the elections been truly free; in Europe, the public is even more critical of the United States than are the leaders. In the spring of 2004, Paul Bremer declared that “basically Iraq is on track to realize the kind of Iraq that Iraqis want and that Americans want, which is a democratic Iraq.” Leaving aside the unwarranted optimism, the assumption that Iraqis and Americans want the same thing reveals a touching but misplaced faith in universal values and harmony of interests among peoples and therefore among democratic regimes.

Bremer and others in the administration’s confusion arises from the belief that turning Iraq into a democracy is itself a substantive policy outcome and not an interim procedure that could lead to any number of substantive results both for us and the Iraqis. Procedural schemes in government are justified to the extent they lead to some long-run practical benefit. They are practical inventiosn for practical goals like safety, commerce, and order. There should be no purely idealistic procedures–either in domestic or foreign policy–if they would likely lead to some abhorrent practical outcome, such as a society’s destruction. Here the supporters of a deontological and idealistic foreign policy have deluded themselves into thinking that they’re practical and that their opponents simply lack sufficient commitment to the cause, instead of recognizing that they’re merely gambling that the long-run practical outcome will result from the unknown quantity of Iraqi public opinion as expressed through elections. This is dangerous and irresponsible, considering the stakes.

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