Gun-to-the-Head Democratization

Robert D. Kaplan, the author of an extraordinary series of recent articles in the Atlantic Monthly over the last couple of years, had an op-ed piece in the NYTimes on the weekend. "Barren Ground for Democracy" seeks to encourage us to "look at the campaign in the Persian Gulf region not as an isolated effort but as the culmination of a decade-long effort to bring the vast lands of the defunct Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and Asia into the modern world and the Western orbit."

The Iraq War is the latest in a slow process of spreading democracy from west to east. Kaplan argues that the project began with the end of the Cold War and the de-Soviet-isation of Eastern Europe. It continued into the 90s with the efforts of NATO to clean up the Balkans and the Near East. It is now being undertaken in the Middle East, specifically in Iraq.

What Kaplan emphasises is that the effort is getting harder and harder the further from Western Europe we go. Kaplan argues that we have been blind to this reality when dealing with Iraq:

In the 1990's, those supporting humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia branded references to difficult history and geography as "determinism" and "essentialism" - academic jargon for fatalism. In the views of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, group characteristics based on a shared history and geography no longer mattered, for in a post-cold war world of globalization everyone was first and foremost an individual. Thus if Poland, say, was ready overnight for Western-style democracy, then so too were Bosnia, Russia, Iraq - and Liberia, for that matter.

This, I think, is a bit of a simplification: while some neocons did indeed expect the Iraq War to be quick and that elections could be held within months of the "liberation", this was not in any way a complete consensus. Many, especially those who fall into the "liberal imperialist" wing of the neoconservative camp, recognised that the peace would be more difficult than the war, and that democracy and liberalisation would take years, if not decades, to take root. Kaplan continues:

By invading Iraq, Republican neoconservatives - the most fervent of Wilsonians - simply took that liberal idealist argument of the 1990's to its logical conclusion. Indeed, given that Saddam Hussein was ultimately responsible for the violent deaths of several times more people than the Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic, how could any liberal in favor of intervention in the Balkans not also favor it in the case of Iraq? And because the human rights abuses in Iraq showed no sign of abatement, much like those in the Balkans, our intervention was justified in order to stop an ongoing rape-and-killing machine.

And is there anything wrong with this? Of course not. What Kaplan seems to be advising, and what I think is an obvious point, is that blind optimism and naivete are dangerous in foreign policy. Kaplan is another example of a trend I have been noticing of neoconservatives aligning themselves more with Democrats and less with Republicans. He is another in the Francis Fukuyama and Niall Ferguson vein of neoconservatives who, while agreeing with the general neocon goal of democratisation and liberalisation of the world, at the tip of a sword if necessary, realise that it is not an easy task, it will not be quick and it will involve some form of imperialism for quite some time.