No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Wes Clark on What went wrong in Iraq - followed by my take on the future.

Wes Clark has an article in Washington Monthly in which he describes what the Bush administration has done regarding turning Iraq into a democracy. The following is his main paragraph:

This dream of engineering events in the Middle East to follow those of the Soviet Union has led to an almost unprecedented geostrategic blunder. One crucial reason things went wrong, I believe, is that the neoconservatives misunderstood how and why the Soviet Union fell and what the West did to contribute to that fall. They radically overestimated the role of military assertiveness while underestimating the value of other, subtler measures. They then applied those theories to the Middle East, a region with very different political and cultural conditions. The truth is this: It took four decades of patient engagement to bring down the Iron Curtain, and 10 years of deft diplomacy to turn chaotic, post-Soviet states into stable, pro-Western democracies. To achieve the same in the Middle East will require similar engagement, patience, and luck.

I have underlined what I consider the central premise of his article. Read the article.

Now, another key point he makes. We did not invade any Communist country. We contained them, a decision made after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. As George Kennan published his seminal Foreign Affairs article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" the Soviet Union would ultimately collapse as a result of the internal contradictions it was based on. But we had to help.

The 1975 Helsinki Accords proved to be the crucial step in opening the way for the subsequent peaceful democratization of the Soviet bloc. The accords, signed by the Communist governments of the East, guaranteed individual human and political rights to all peoples and limited the authority of governments to act against their own citizens. However flimsy the human rights provisions seemed at the time, they provided a crucial platform for dissidents such as Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov. These dissidents, though often jailed and exiled, built organizations that publicized their governments' many violations of the accords, garnering Western attention and support and inspiring their countrymen with the knowledge that it was possible to stand up to the political powers that be.

With the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, it became clear once more that it would be the demands of native peoples, not military intervention from the West, that would extend democracy's reach eastward. Step by step, the totalitarian governments and structures of the East lost legitimacy in the eyes of their own citizens and elites. The United States and Western Europe were engaged, of course, in assisting these indigenous political movements, both directly and indirectly. Western labor unions, encouraged by their governments, aided the emergence of a democratic trade union movement, especially in Poland. Western organizations provided training for a generation of human-rights workers. Western broadcast media pumped in culture and political thought, raising popular expectations and undercutting Communist state propaganda. And Western businesses and financial institutions entered the scene, too, ensnaring command economies in Western market pricing and credit practices. The Polish-born Pope John Paul II directed Catholic churches in Eastern Europe and around the world to encourage their congregants to lobby for democracy and liberal freedoms.

Such outreach had profound effects, but only over time.

It was also critical that the Communist countries were western nations who had undergone the Enlightenment. The Islamic nations are not. The people in the middle east are frequently shocked by what they consider the libertine excesses of the west. Some of that shock has led a few radical extremists to attempt to reject the west through violence, much as a frightened cat will scratch those trying to help it.

The Islamic nations do not have a goal of converting the west in the manner that the Communist nations did. They do, however, want to minimize the damage done to their cultures by any associating with the west. As a result, it is my opinion that they will be much more easily contained than Communism was, but the problems of getting the Islamic nations to adopt democracy will be more intractable.

This would not matter much if they did not sit on as much oil as they do, and if there were not a proxy war between the west and Islam which has been taking place for the last fifty plus years between Israel and the Palestinians. If both the Palestinians and the Israelis did not have outside support, it would have been over long ago. Since both sides DO have outside support, the solution to the war/Intifada or whatever it is called this week will require outside mediation.

The invasion of Iraq (Bush's War) was in part an effort to change the calculus in Israel/Palestine. All it has done is make the solution more difficult to achieve.

In fact, the military invasion of Iraq very probably set back the possible good relations between the western secular democracies and the Islamic world by a generation. The west is extremely strong in armies based on industrialism, but the Islamic nations are learning how to defeat those armies using terrorism and propaganda. Terrorism and propaganda are highly dependent on television, so that the war is actually being fought largely outside of military means.

We can win every military battle and still lose the war strategically. Our superior military simply provides new images to use against the west on TV and in propaganda. Terrorism is used to inflame the soldiers so that they take the actions that make better propaganda. It is a very modern, high-tech, and intellectual form of war that makes bombs and bullets into weapons against those who fire them even more than against those who are fired on.

The Islamic fundamentalists use of terrorism and propaganda will also undermine the desire to remain separate from the rest of the world. This is the inherent contradiction that will undermine Islamic separatism. However, the insistence of our conservatives and Israel's' Sharon to use overwhelming military force against terrorists will continue to poison the well, making settlement of the violence unlikely.

We will have to stop trying to use the apparent "quick fix" offered by our superior military and begin to try to understand what they are afraid of and work to accommodate them on that. We can't just demonize the enemy. In this war, the victory will go to the side that best understands the other. Usually that will be the less technologically advanced party involved. Ask General Giap in Viet Nam.

In short, we need to get out of Iraq, then work with the existing governments in the middle east to minimize anti-western terrorism. At the same time, we will need to build cultural bridges between our culture and theirs, so that they can feel they retain control of how they live without always being afraid of another conquest by the west.

As they industrialize, as they must, they will begin to adopt democratic forms of government, much as the South Koreans and the Taiwanese have done. Military invasion delays that, as resisting such an invasion requires more totalitarian forms of government to continue to exist.

posted by Richard at 9:56 PM