September 03, 2006

Drawing the Wrong Lesson from Our Failure Thus Far in Iraq

Link: The Jagged World - New York Times.

David Brooks writes:

Americans blew the postwar administration of Iraq because they assumed they were liberating a nation sort of like their own.

This is becoming the neocon meme to explain the failure thus far of their world-remaking plan: We thought that other societies all longed for democracy and toleration and a liberal lifestyle, but alas we were sadly mistaken. Some societies prefer ruthless autocrats to liberal democrats. Some societies are divided by unbridgeable differences along religious lines, where other societies learn to coexist without violence and even flourish.

The failure of Iraqi reconstruction likely has more to do with our own actions rather than their social pathologies. We became the local autocrats, with proconsul Bremer the incompetent leader, his diktats enforced with ruthless force, and with lower level administrators who were inexperienced but well-nurtured on ideology. We spent Iraqi money carelessly on American contractors.

It wasn't that Iraqis preferred their own local ruthless autocrats to the American ones. I suspect that they would prefer neither crew.

I do not here excuse those in the Mid-east who have exploited our own errors to savage the local populations and our troops and contractors. A more clever reconstruction--led by regional parties--might have avoided creating the environment that the insurgents could readily exploit. Imagine if the leaders of the reconstruction efforts had been Egyptian and Jordanian, and only the financiers American. Imagine if companies from Brazil and Malaysia and China and Saudi Arabia had rebuilt the infrastructure--funded by American and European powers. In lieu of a colonial master, the Iraqis might have found in the United States a distant benefactor.

It was news to the neocons that the people of the world wanted democracy; their ideological forebearers in conservative movements had not been entirely friendly to the century of decolonization that preceded this new Millennium. But now we cannot allow them feel to confirmed that their more benign view of the world's people was too optimistic.

Posted by Anupam Chander on September 3, 2006 at 02:01 PM in Globalization | Permalink