Part four of a four-part series
After seven years, many set-backs, and too many dead, ex-President Bush seems to be winning his gamble, that freedom can come to Iraq. The price has been high, but not out of line with that paid by others.
England took 20 years and almost one million dead to arrive at her settlement; France had the Terror, and many changes of government; the Constitutional Convention is held up as the gold standard in the peaceful construction of government, but it came between wars, not instead of them: there was a war before, and then a war later, and that one took 620,000 lives.
Some small monarchies slip painlessly into becoming de facto democracies, but large complex countries find transition difficult. Bush was wrong to think democracy in Iraq could come quickly and painlessly. But his critics were wrong to think that because it could not come quickly and painlessly, it never could happen at all.
A third mistake is in thinking that with more troops at the start democracy building would been possible, or could have produced a sturdy and viable state. In 2003-05, we were shunning the tribes, while seeking a national state, and a western idea of a civil society. Oops. Turned out the tribes were Iraq’s civil society, and they took the lead in ousting extremists, and seeking political settlement.
In 2003-05, the Sunnis still thought they could regain their old power; by 2006, they had begun to think differently. In 2003-05, there was no political center; in 2007 one was being created, as Al Qaeda and the Shiia militias pushed the moderate Sunnis and Shiia away.
In 2003 to 2005, we might have crushed the Sunnis along with Al Qaeda, and ruled them as conquerors. As it was, the Sunnis of their own will turned their backs on Al Qaeda, and joined us against it: with this, the war changed from our war on them (and Al Qaeda), to a war of them and ourselves against terror—and the freedom agenda changed from an American project into an Iraqi idea.
It was the Americans’ idea to invade Iraq, depose Saddam, and try to impose a new federal government, but it was the Sunnis’ idea to turn on Al Qaeda, join the Americans, and to reach out to the Shiia—as it was the Shiias’ idea to accept it and turn on their militias, and Bush’s idea to seize on the moment, and then let Iraq take the lead.
In 2003, democracy was something we were giving Iraq, and it did not prove viable. Now, it is something they are giving themselves, with our assistance. It is this distinction which makes all the difference. Which is why this time it may work.
“Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every heart and soul,” Bush said in 2005 at his second inaugural. It is not known how many Iraqis feel this in the way that moves Bush and his hero, Natan Sharansky, but they do seem to have come, after a great deal of suffering, to the conclusion that a form of democracy – or power shared under rules kept and agreed on – is in the enlightened self-interest of all.
Abba Eban once said that the democracies do the right thing after all other alternatives have been tried and exhausted, but they become democracies only after they are exhausted, and other solutions – war or dictatorship or too much or too little state power – have been attempted, and failed.
If democracy turns out to take root in Iraq, it will have been built on mistakes made by Bush and the Sunnis, that were caught and reversed at the very last moment, which is more or less par for the course.
It was these mistakes – Bush’s “light footprint” and the Sunnis’ Al Qaeda alliance – that created the chaos that caused the reaction – the will to cohere, and the network of sturdy local alliances – that are the foundations of modern democracy.
This would not have surprised our own founders, no strangers to tumult and irony. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Lafayette (who would be jailed by the revolution he helped to make happen) “We are not to expect to be transported from despotism to freedom in a feather bed.”
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
