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| Shattered illusions |
chekhovToo |
06/30/04 |
Francis Fukuyama: Shattered illusions - The Age.
29jun04
OF all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neo-conservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on from there to democratise the broader Middle East.
It struck me as strange precisely because these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and how social planners could never control behaviour or deal with unanticipated consequences.
If the US cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington, DC, how in the world does it expect to bring democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot?
Several neo-conservatives, such as Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer, have noted how wrong people were after World War II in asserting that Japan could not democratise. Krauthammer asks: "Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?" He is echoing an argument made most forthrightly by the eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who has at several junctures suggested that pessimism about the prospects for a democratic Iraq betrays lack of respect for Arabs.
It is, of course, nowhere written that Arabs are incapable of democracy, and it is certainly foolish for cynical Europeans to assert with great confidence that democracy is impossible in the Middle East. We have, indeed, been fooled before, not just in Japan but in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism.
But possibility is not probability, and good policy is not made by staking everything on a throw of the dice. Culture is not destiny, but culture plays an important role in making possible certain kinds of institutions – something that is usually taken to be a conservative insight.
Though I, more than most people, am associated with the idea that history's arrow points to democracy, I have never believed that democracies can be created anywhere and everywhere through simple political will.
Prior to the Iraq war, there were many reasons for thinking that building a democratic Iraq was a task of a complexity that would be nearly unmanageable. Some reasons had to do with the nature of Iraqi society: the fact that it would be decompressing rapidly from totalitarianism, its ethnic divisions, the role of politicised religion, its tribal structure and the dominance of extended kin and patronage networks, and its susceptibility to influence from other parts of the Middle East that were passionately anti-American.
But other reasons had to do with America. The US has been involved in approximately 18 nation-building projects between its conquest of the Philippines in 1899 and the current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the overall record is not a pretty one. The cases of unambiguous success – Germany, Japan and South Korea – were all cases where US forces came and then stayed indefinitely.
In the first two cases, we weren't nation-building at all, but only re-legitimating societies that had very powerful states. In all of the other cases, the US either left nothing behind in terms of self-sustaining institutions, or else made things worse by creating, as in the case of Nicaragua, a modern army and police but no lasting rule of law.
This gets to a fundamental point about unipolarity. True, there is vast disparity of power between the US and the rest of the world, vaster even than Rome's dominance at the height of its empire. But that dominance is clear-cut only along two dimensions of national power, the cultural realm and the ability to fight and win intensive conventional wars. Americans have no particular taste or facility for nation-building; we want exit strategies rather than empires.
So where does the domestic basis of support come for this unbelievably ambitious effort to politically transform one of the world's most troubled and hostile regions? And if the nation is really a commercial republic uncomfortable with empire, why should Americans be so eager to expand its domain? In Iraq, since the US invasion, we Americans have been our usual inept and disorganised selves in planning for and carrying out the reconstruction, something that should not have surprised anyone familiar with American history.
As it happened, many Europeans raised some of these doubts in the lead-up to war in March 2003. Many Europeans did not particularly trust the US to handle the post-war situation well, much less the more ambitious agenda of democratising the Middle East. They also tended not to be persuaded that Iraq was as dangerous as the Bush administration claimed.
They argued that Baathist Iraq had little to do with al-Qa'ida, and that attacking Iraq would be a distraction from the larger war on terrorism. And they believed that the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a more dangerous source of instability and terrorism than Iraq, and that the Bush administration was undercutting its own credibility by appearing to side so strongly with the policies of Ariel Sharon.
All of these were and are, of course, debatable propositions. On the question of the manageability of post-war Iraq, the more sceptical European position was almost certainly right.
The Bush administration went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the post-war situation would be: it thought the reconstruction would be self-financing, that Americans could draw on a lasting well of gratitude for liberating Iraq, and that we could occupy the country with a small force structure and even draw US forces down significantly within a few months.
On the question of the threat posed by Iraq, everyone – Europeans and Americans – were evidently fooled into thinking that it possessed significant stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But on this issue, the European bottom line proved to be closer to the truth than the administration's far more alarmist position.
The question of pre-war Iraq-al-Qa'ida links has become intensely politicised in the US since the war. My reading of the evidence is that these linkages existed but that their significance was limited. We have learned since September 11 that al-Qa'ida did not need the support of a state such as Iraq to do a tremendous amount of damage to the US, and that attacking Iraq was not the most direct way to get at al-Qa'ida.
On the question of Palestine, the Europeans are likely wrong, or at least wrong in their belief that we could move to a durable settlement of the conflict if only the US decided to use its influence with Israel.
The point here is not who is right, but rather that the prudential case was not nearly as open-and-shut as many neo-conservatives believed. They talk as if their (that is, the Bush administration's) judgment had been vindicated at every turn, and that any questioning of their judgment could only be the result of base or dishonest motives. If only this were true. The fact that Washington's judgment was flawed has created an enormous legitimacy problem for the US, one that will hurt American interests for a long time to come.
The lesson of Iraq is that the US needs to be more prudent and subtle in exercising power in pursuit of both its interests and values. The world's sole superpower needs to remember that its margin of power is viewed with great suspicion around the world and will set off countervailing reactions if that power is not exercised judiciously.
This means, in the first instance, doing the simple work of diplomacy and coalition-building that the Bush administration seemed so reluctant to undertake prior to the Iraq War, and to not gratuitously insult the "common opinions of mankind".
The US does not need to embrace the UN or multilateralism for its own sake, or because we somehow believe that such institutions are inherently more legitimate than nation states.
On the other hand, the US needs like-minded allies to accomplish both the realist and idealist portions of our agenda, and should spend much more time and energy cultivating them.
Democracy promotion, through all of the available tools at America's disposal, should remain high on the agenda, particularly with regard to the Middle East. But the US needs to be more realistic about its nation-building abilities, and cautious in taking on large social engineering projects in parts of the world it doesn't understand very well.
Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, is author of The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin, 1992). A longer version of this article appears in the upcoming edition of The National Interest in Washington.
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Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 07/01/04 4:04 am:
ER,actually my answer was refering to Kuwait and Iran ,as they were the 2 nations that has a vast supply of oil. I could also have included the defense of the Suadi oil supply in the 1990 war.That would bring us to about 1/2 of the worlds oil supply we have protected without any confiscation .
Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 07/01/04 9:06 am:
I would like to point out that as of today the 9 year 'occupation' of the Balkans by the U.S. is coming to a close .It strikes me as ironic that the bemoaning of the futility of nation building ,and quagmires were not heard during this adventure .hmmmm could it be because it was ok for a Democrat President to unilaterally commit U.S. forces ?
Clarification/Follow-up by Bradd on 07/01/04 10:54 am:
to Tom:
Yes, I hold Powell in high regard. His presentation before the UN was, at best, the action of a loyal soldier with provocative but not convincing evidence. He failed to suade most of those in attendance, and I suspect Powell will resign early in the second term (assuming GB wins).
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