[extropy-chat] Fukuyama's perhaps surprising views on Iraq

[Damien Broderick]

----------
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.

Francis Fukuyama: Shattered illusions

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.