This page strongly supported the attack on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. We supported it as a battle in the larger struggle with Islam. We strongly opposed the Bush Administration's policy of using American soldiers to nation build post-war Iraq and so we opposed continuation of the war after Saddam Hussein was captured. In our view that was the mission to be accomplished and American lives lost since then have been in vain.
We opposed the mission of creating a democratic state in Iraq to serve as a beacon for the rest of the Arab world not because we dislike democracies or beacons but because we felt that even a casual survey of the terrain revealed the Tigris and Euphrates Valley to be infertile soil for planting democratic seeds.
President Bush has continued with his policy. We hope that he succeeds but see less chance of that now than we did when Hussein was captured. The cover story on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the June issue of The Atlantic reveals the religious-like faith that the president and Secretary Rice have in democracy--for Iraq and everybody else. The president is a born-again Christian and Rice, whose nomination for Secretary of State we opposed, is strongly religious also. Their religious views have effected their foreign policy, to its detriment, in the view here.
Philip Zelikow a member of the administration's National Security Council, "often described as the secretary's 'intellectual soul mate' is quoted in The Atlantic as saying,
"Democracy, for Secretary Rice, I think, and for [the administration] is a universal safety valve for social conflict. And as they confront parts of the world in profound social and political crisis, they prescribe democracy."
That is the problem, or rather those are the problems. A humbler foreign policy team would not conclude that our way is necessarily the best way for all people, nor would a wiser team. As the article points out Secretary Rice need look no further for evidence against her universal prescription of democracy than the disastrous elections on the West Bank that brought Hamas to power, elections that Rice insisted on despite counsel that they were premature. Or she could ask her personal Arabic interpreter Gamel Helal. When asked by The Atlantic's writer what it's like to translate words like "freedom" and "democracy" which are so loaded with western meaning into Arabic, Mr. Helal said,
"In the Middle East, they look at things and ask, Is it halal or haram, Is it approved by the religion or not? If you go to a Bedouin society and you tell them that the state will determine how you're going to settle a conflict between you and your cousin, you must be out of your mind, because the most important and powerful tool to them will be tribal law, which is unwritten."
The problems with the Administration's Iraq policy are a lack of American humility, and religion--the religious zeal of the President and the Secretary of State, and the religious zeal of the Iraqis. Religious zeal demands faith in the face of conflicting evidence. It prescribes its way for other people who might be unreceptive. There is also a fundamental tension between religious faith and democracy, as evidenced in Mr. Helal's Bedouin example.
Winston Churchill wrote in his history of World War II that one of the causes of the war was American insistence on a democracy for post-Versailles Germany rather than a constitutional monarchy, which was preferred by Hindenburg. In Churchill's view the monarchy would have provided a stabilizing anchor for an angry people and would have lessened the chance that that anger would be translated into the election of angry leaders. The United States did not make that same mistake with post-World War II Japan. For just Churchill's reasons Japan was allowed to retain its emperor. Humility and wisdom would make today's facts and history's lessons the guides for our foreign policy but humility and wisdom are not guides for the fervently faithful. Only faith is. This is Public Occurrences.
public occurrences
