The diversity of opinion on the war in Iraq among conservative commentators remains pronounced. There is no conservative “party line” on this one. Some are resolutely supportive of the war.
We could go on. The point is that voting makes sense only after national unity has been established, only when the people lining up at the ballot boxes see themselves as national brothers. Voting is a consequence of national unity, not a cause. The problem is that our government is proceeding as if the upcoming vote in Iraq will bring about nation-building. Things do not work that way. Our government is defining success in Iraq as successful nation-building — when no one seems to have any hope for nation-building to work in that divided land.
There are lessons to be learned from this mess. Maybe we won’t make the same mistake again. The Church has long made clear that democracy is not the only morally acceptable form of government; that there are certain times and certain countries that are unsuitable for the democratic process. It is not “cultural condescension” to say that. I repeat: There were times and circumstances when the countries of Europe and the United States were not “ready” for free elections.
The Church was willing to collaborate with the authoritarian governments of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, fearing that Marxists in those countries were poised to used democratic liberties to establish totalitarian rule, as the Bolsheviks did in Russia. The Church recognizes that majority rule does not always bring justice. Majority rule in the antebellum South would not have ensured freedom for the blacks held there in slavery. There is general agreement among historians that Hitler, at the peak of his popularity, would have won landslide victories at the polls. A free election in Germany in, say, 1938, would not have secured justice for German Jews. Similarly, there is no reason to assume that a free election in Iraq in 2005, one which gives control of the government to the Shia majority, will bring freedom and justice to the Sunni minority or to the Kurds.
The war against Saddam Hussein’s regime may have been necessary and proper. That argument can be made. And perhaps the American people need slogans about spreading democracy and defending human rights to rally them around a military effort. That also can be argued. Earlier administrations used catchphrases about “making the world safe for democracy” and fighting for the “Four Freedoms” to that end. So there may have been a need to talk about “freeing the Iraqis from their brutal dictator” as part of the build-up to this war. The mistake was in keeping nation-building on the front-burner as a central objective. Doing that may mean that we have placed victory beyond our reach.
Saddam’s connection to Islamic terrorist groups, his development of weapons of mass destruction, his threat to the balance of power in the Middle East and the world’s oil supplies — all these things can be argued as a reason for our going to war against him. But not some United States’ responsibility to spread democracy in the Muslim world. There is a reason why “Wilsonian internationalism” was once routinely used as a term of disparagement in the conservative movement.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at [email protected].
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
Oliver North, Rush Limbaugh and the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, are in this camp. Charley Reese, Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran disagree, equally resolutely. They are as critical of the war as anyone on the Left. Not for the same reasons, of course. But let us leave that (important) point aside for the moment.
Whatever one’s view of the war, the time has come for some reappraisals. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s recent admission that he and his advisors did not think the resistance to our occupation would be as deep-seated and as prolonged as it has been is a concession of great significance. Leaks from the CIA indicate that many in the agency see more difficult days ahead. Even committed supporters of the war are left scratching their heads when they try to come up with an exit strategy for our troops.
If you ask me, they will be scratching their heads for a long time if they go on defining success in terms of nation-building. I have yet to hear a supporter of the war come up with a scenario in which the various factions in Iraq will live in peace in a democratic Iraq. You can’t fault them for that. There is no sense of Iraqi nationhood. The country consists of factions of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds unwilling to live as loyal opposition to one another. Democracy does not appeal to people who see it as a way for their enemies to gain control over them.
We should not forget that Saddam Hussein and his Sunni followers were able to hold Iraq together only through a brutal suppression of the Kurds and Shiites. The Sunnis currently fighting our troops are making clear they have no intention of accepting a future that gives the Shiites, who outnumber them, an opening to administer payback.
Let us not pretend: If we are relying on the scenario of upcoming elections at the end of January as our exit strategy, we are being naïve — or looking for a fig leaf. The sight of Iraqi officials going through the mechanics of counting votes will not be a sign that nation-building has worked. It is what happens after a government elected by the majority in Iraq takes office that is crucial. And no serious thinker that I am aware of believes the Sunnis will accept the new government. They will go on fighting — fighting us, with little chance of immediate victory on the battlefield, if our troops remain in Iraq; or fighting the army of the newly elected Iraqi government, with a good chance of bringing it down, if our troops leave.
There was a time when the US government understood all this — in 1991, when the decision was made not to “go to Baghdad” to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At that time the US secretary of defense argued, “Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists: How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?”
The secretary of defense who spoke those words in 1991 was Dick Cheney. This is a fascinating turn of events. President Bush holds it to be “cultural condescension” to say what Dick Cheney said in 1991, to maintain that Iraq might not be ready for a democratic society on Western terms. The president argues it is demeaning of the Iraqis to question “whether this country, or that people, or this group, are ‘ready’ for democracy.” Repeatedly, he has spoken of his conviction that it is God’s will that all people be free to live in a democratic society. And by that he apparently means right now. Tony Blair has said that it is “a myth” to hold that “our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture.”
Sorry, that is not the case. And wishing will not make it so. Political freedom is a product of culture. In Blair’s own England it took a bloody war between Saxons and Normans to lay the groundwork for English nationhood. And it took centuries of living together and fighting together under the Norman victors before a sense of English national unity was forged. More to the point, it was that sense of unity that permitted the British to put their trust in free elections. Free elections became feasible because the people of Great Britain reached a point when they no longer saw those who disagreed with them politically as enemy factions, but as the loyal opposition — when they no longer viewed each other as the Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites see each other in modern Iraq.
The same could be said of the other Western democracies. Germany was not created by free elections. Quite the opposite. Bismarck used war — “iron and blood” — to forge the separate German states into nationhood in the late 19th century. Participatory democracy came much later. Abraham Lincoln did not wait for the southern states to vote themselves back into the Union. The leaders of the Reconquista did not bide their time until the Moors were ready to accept Spanish nationhood; they drove them into the sea. Garibaldi and Cavour used the force of arms to unite the separate Italian states, not the ballot box.
