The Impossibility of Iraqi Democracy

History, indeed, is like a picture gallery in which there are few originals and many copies.

Alexis deTocqueville "The Old Regime and the French Revolution." 1856

For years now, as both "the War on Terror" and the War in Iraq have devolved more clearly into tragic blunders, the Administration has consistently relied on two themes to sustain their legitimacy: 1. "fighting the terrorists over there," and 2. making the world safer by establishing democracy in Arabia and the Middle East. Amazingly, despite the widespread, progressive loss of faith in Bush’s efforts, recent polls reflect a rise in his approval rating.

What’s happening here? Are the polls fixed? Or is it possible that many misinformed Americans still fail to see the impossibilities of his doomed objectives? Or could it be a combination of blind ignorance and good old American idealism, which in turn periodically reanimates support for those initiatives? What the hell, people are thinking, Who wants the terrorists here? And, Why not try to establish democracy over there, since democratic nations are more beneficial for American interests?

The presumption about the terrorists being kept over there by the war is almost laughable, that is if so many people weren’t dying and American coffers weren’t being emptied at such a hefty rate. The premise Bush and the Neocons are pitching is that there are, for the most part, a relatively finite number of malcontents who become rabble-rousers - the Islamic world’s equivalent to folks like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. You know, boys who hated their moms or never knew their dads and grew up bent. Unlike bin Laden, whose upper class background and soft-spoken mannerisms didn’t readily match this Hitchcockian profile, Zarqawi - who no doubt tortured animals at a young age - was a perfect and, in his prime, frequently exhibited example. He may have ended up a martyr for "them" but he became an ideal poster boy for bad ass jihadists for "us."

Following the logic of this psychologically intensive premise, those nihilists, who would otherwise end up slashers like Jack the Ripper, instead, go on to terrorize Americans and Westerners. How many of them could there be? Right? A few thousand maybe, or so the logic would have Americans believe. So keep up the good fight, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get rid of a bunch of them, one painful bullet at a time. Accordingly, after enough of them fall, the environment will become propitious for fostering democracy.

On this issue the Administration is hoping that since terrorism mystifies most Americans - even at this late date - the people in general aren’t going to see the lapse in logic. Occasionally a report comes out, claiming that Islamic terrorists are likely to be middle class and seemingly normal, but for those who’ve bought "the War on Terror" premise, those rebels can be routinely seen as anomalies. After all, Americans are thinking to themselves, only a real wacko would strap on a suicide belt, and there couldn’t possibly be that many wackos. But there are.

The Administration’s calling them insurgents, yet many are merely revolutionaries fighting to protect their own vested interests as opposed to radical jihadists, particularly the Sunnis who have lost virtually everything, especially security from those who they had once tortured. In the process many of them are calling themselves al-Qaeda, mostly for the sake of bolstering their image.

At first these circumstances seemed to affirm Bush’s claim that pre-Saddam Iraq had cultivated terrorists and that al-Qaeda had roots there. But the extent of the revolutionary activities has reached a saturation point that’s undermining Bush’s Hitchcockian Terrorist Profile. It’s become indisputable, especially since the leak of the recent Intelligence report: America’s long occupation is fueling radical responses far beyond the numbers of pure wacko sociopaths found in any given society.

This has become a full blown ideological movement, not based first and foremost on hatred of the West or jihadist sentiments, though they’re certainly providing inspiration, but rather based on triumphing over the occupying force that has lost its legitimacy. This isn’t terrorism per se, but instead revolutionaries enfeebled by circumstances that force them to resort to the most twisted acts of rebellion at their disposal. If they had an abundant cache of "smart" bombs and a modern arsenal of depleted uranium munitions, they’d be using those rather than suicide belts and IEDs.

Are there terrorists per se among their ranks? Absolutely, but the chief source of animus stirring their actions is the abiding presence of the alien U.S. force that should’ve returned home a long time ago, which stays under the pretense of establishing a "democracy."

Whatever possibility there may have been for democracy has long ago disappeared, though it would be extraordinarily difficult to prove there was ever a possibility - not a true, Western type, secular democracy. Those believing Iraq could suddenly, or even within the next 50 years, become a true democracy must overlook Islamic history since 622. They must pretend there’s a precedent for true Islamic democracy (not Hamas being elected via a democratic election), deny that Islamic culture is reliant on Shiria above all - a distinctly theocratic concept, and believe that individuals behaviorally conditioned by tribal habituation and limited reliance on consumer markets will somehow surrender their beliefs to what they commonly perceive as the devil’s workshop.

What supporters of Bush’s woeful policies don’t seem to get is that there was no indigenous hunger for liberty in Saddam’s repressed society that resembled the spirit of freedom that animated American and European democracies - the vital push by the people to seize their own fates. That idealistic revolution hasn’t yet occurred in Islamic lands. The concepts developed by the Enlightenment philosophers, including Rousseau, Turgot, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Voltaire - many of them purely secular ideas - have no Islamic equivalents. Sure, there are Aristotelian and secular Muslims thinkers and writers but their influence hasn’t reached the prominence of the West’s 18th century social architects. And that’s not likely to change any time soon. Without this base of disseminated beliefs, without the widespread, palpable desire to be truly free, which includes a separation of State from Mosque, how is it possible for Iraq to truly be democratic? It isn’t.

A lesson in point for how democratic aims can go horribly awry is brilliantly illustrated
by deTocqueville in "The Old Regime and the French Revolution." An aristocrat disturbed by the turn of events, he may, at times, have evoked a tone of sour grapes to fervent populists, but, in fact, history proved the merit of his critique.

In particular he’s highly critical of the Physiocrats, or, as he pejoratively calls them "the Economists." This school, which represented the first formal articualtion of modern capitalist models, influencing Adam Smith along the way, were, effectively the Neocons of their day in the sense that they prescribed free market systems on an ideological basis. Encapsulating their views, deTocqueville quotes Abbe Bodeau: "The State makes men exactly what it wishes them to be." Sound familiar? It’s PNAC circa 1750, or vice versa to be more precise.

It’s the same logic being used by the Administration in Iraq: Through strenuous effort we can
make them democratic. Really? It’s never happened that way before in history, Why would it work now? deTocqueville’s assessment sounds eerily familiar: "No previous political upheaval, however violent, had aroused such passionate enthusiasm, for the ideal the French Revolution set before it was not merely a change in the French social system but nothing short of a regeneration of the whole human race. It created an atmosphere of missionary fervor and, indeed, assumed all the aspects of a religious revival - much to the consternation of contemporary observers. It would perhaps be truer to say that it developed into a species of religion, if a singularly imperfect one, since it was without a God, without a ritual or promise of a future life. Nevertheless, this strange religion has, like Islam, overrun the whole world with its apostles, militants, and martyrs."

With this view the clash between God fearing and godlessness, ideologues preaching democracies and orthoprax Muslims prescribing jihad, free market exponents and otherworldly adherents is imminently clear. Democracy? In Iraq? It took over 50 years after the French Revolution in France to establish, and they were feverishly demanding it. How long will it take for people who see secular democracy as an alien concept to demand it? Don’t hold your breath.

And for all of you who feel entitled to spread the noble secular religion of democracy around the world to people who never asked for it, quit acting so sanctimonious. You’re doing America a disservice and you’re irreparably harming the reputation of democracies everywhere. Who’s to say that democracy is right for Iraq or Iran? And even if those countries would benefit from its implementation, Why not let them figure out how to set that up? Why, if you were truly democratic yourself, you wouldn’t have your hand in people’s faces, telling them what kind of government they should have. After all, that’s not democratic; it’s dictatorial.