Several people have accused me of being unrealistically Pollyanna-ish in even suggesting–as I did when I wrote my column in last Thursday’s CSM— that this US administration might be interested in working toward a timely, free, and fair election Iraq… In this post, I’ll give my quick defense of that column. In a subsequent post I want to start looking at what seems to be emerging as the “Negroponte Doctrine” in Iraq, and what that mean for the country.
Okay, my defense of having written the column. My friend Jim, for example, wrote me quite laconically:”Good article. The advice is not likely to be taken, as you well know.
I wrote back to him:
- Yes, I know that because they’ve never taken my advice before! However, I do think it’s important to carry on making these arguments in public to help educate the public and to lay down clear markers along the path of this so-far tragic history. Then maybe in 20 years, after untold thousands more have been killed in and as a result of Iraq, historians can dig back thru the record and say, “well it still could have been possible to do things peacefully even as late as [Sept. 2004; or whenever]”
I think it’s also important to just keep on and on demonstrating that there are ALWAYS alternatives to the use of violence.
(In retrospect, I should have started off that reply by saying, “Yes, I ‘know ‘ that,” since I don’t actually know it with 100% certainty, at all…)
I would add to the above that I think it’s really never helpful to set off on a discussion–even if it’s with someone whose actions you deeply disagree with–by assuming that that person is inherently “bad”, or has some kind of evil or sinister motives. It’s much productive to assume (and hope) that the person is acting from what she or he considers to be the highest and most excellent of motivations, and to pursue the discussion from there.
The Bushies say they want to bring the blessings of true democracy to Iraq. Well, at one level, it doesn’t even matter whether we believe them on that, or not. But their declarations to that effect do in themselves provide an excellent starting-point for the discussion on: “Okay, if you really want democracy, what might that mean in terms of some behavior change from sides including your own? How can everyone work toward the necessary de-escalation?”
In addition, I believe that profound transformations of human character and human behavior are indeed possible. They happen every day. So I continue to live in hope that what I write might contribute to a good kind of trasnformation, however small.
My working assumption here is that by writing in the Christian Science Monitor I am able to speak to a non-trivial portion of the U.S. political elite–both those inside and those outside the reigning administration. hey, the only time I’ve ever been inside the White House, there was the CSM, folded on a side-table. And I know my pieces have frequently been included in the Pentagon’s dailu news digest service…
If I am in a position to have that discussion with people in the US political elite, then why should I waste it by impugning the motives of the folks I’m able to talk to (and can hope, however minimally, to persuade), or by calling them names?
Also, I honestly don’t see myself as an intellectually wispy, unrealistic “Pollyanna” figure, at all…
I have witnessed enough of human history throughout my sentient life to have understood that (as I said above) deep and positive transformations of human behavior are possible–and, moreover, that they have happened far more frequently in response to intelligent non-violent political action than to violence. I have seen that the use of violence, meanwhile, has always led to additional cascades of violence down into the succeeding years, with resuts that are almost impossible for the enacters of violence to predict.
I don’t need the Dalai Lama to “teach” me these things–though it’s nice to have him out there validating and adding his existential weight to the conclusions I have reached mainly on my own accord and through discussions with friends. I reached these conclusions by trying to watch, listen, and understand the ongoing trends in world affairs. I saw the downfall of the Soviet empire; the transformation of South Africa’s previous white rulers; the power of the first Palestinian intifada…
Regarding the current, extremely violent stance of the US government in world affairs, I am convinced that the longer it continues, the more disastrously matters will turn out for everyone concerned– including for the US citizenry themselves (ourselves). Here we are, being programmed to live in fear and to acceot the deaths of our fellow citizens in the armed services as a “reasonable” cost of responding to what we are told is a “huge and mounting threat”… The Bushies’ whole rhetoric of the GWOT is designed to perpetuate and exacerbate those fears.
But how “realistic” is it anyway, to even imagine that just 4 percent of the world’s total population will be able to continue to dominate the other 96 percent through fear and intimidation (= “terror”) for very long, and reap any fruits of stability at all?
I’m not even arguing abstract ethics here. I’m being, I think, supremely pragmatic (which is also one branch of ethics; but we can continue that discussion elsewhere.)
I so palpably see an alternative way for the US to be in the world–one in which we US citizens are allowed and encouraged to express our natural affinities and our co-humanity with the other 96% of our neighbors on the planet–that it makes me want to scream inside of me sometimes that other compatriots of mine (like Donald Rumsfeld, etc) seem not to be able to see these same “facts” with the clarity I see them with.
But it’s really no use screaming at them. I guess they see the world the way they see it… How can we find a way to connect with them that might give us a chance of changing the present unbearable status quo?
Taking them seriously on their claims to want democracy in Iraq seemed like a good place to start. And I’m convinced that–even if Rumsfeld, Unca Dick Cheney, and the rest of them didn’t get convinced by what I wrote– but still, maybe a few of the people inside and outside the administration who are really serious about desiring democracy started to think a little harder about what the US itself might do differently to help make it happen.
(Oh, I seem to have gone on a bit here. I need to get back to writing the next post, about Negroponte.)
Right on, Helena. I find it so much more useful (if not always effective) to frame the debate in terms of why what you think is best for everybody than what motivates “them” to be so bad and wrong. i look forward very much to seeing you speak at the middle east institute next week!
Hmmm. While i am not one of the people who have accused you of being a Polly-Anna, it seems like this post backs up the accusation. Because you WANT to believe a certain position does not make it so. You seem to have the same attitude as the administration. Their positions are based totally on what they WANT to believe will happen.
One of the key rules of life is never believe what a person says, watch what they DO. In all the administartions in my lifetime that credo is most true about this one. Shooting hellfire missles into crowds and neighborhoods is not the sign of somebody who wants to spread peace and democracy. This is an administration that NEVER tells the truth on their intentions. Not on economic issues, not on ecology issues, not on their plans in the middle east. In fact, they spend an inordinate amount of time preventing the ‘truth’ from being spoken. And actively attack officials who speak it. This administration HATES democracy. Every time there is a free election it goes against them (Spain, Turkey, Germany, America). They prefer to work with dictators (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia). It’s less messy.
There will be no credible elections held voluntarily in Jan. They are already hedging their bets. Once the election is over the military will attempt to stomp all opposition to placing ‘our’ man as a dictator. EVERY single action they make points in this direction. They MUST have those bases (in their minds they must) and no freely elected Iraqi government will sign the necesary treaties. Not to mention the contracts that have been (illegally) signed. The administration is very nearly past the point of no return.
Quixote, not Pollyana, may be the model here.
Eleven UN people are to set up and supvervise 30,000 voting sites. By January. Doesn’t that say it all? Pray they get good body armor. Was Bremmer any more quixotic to assert all those police recruitment and training figures? Easier to imagine another miracle of the fish and loaves.
Altruism is difficult to nurture. Non-violent action requires a setting where there is at least some recognized limit on violence. If not, then raw power trumps not only good will, but even the ordinary pursuit of money.
Fair elections require years of trials and maturation of civic organizations and rules of play. India, Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico, Korea, and (now) S. Africa all had years of tutelage under single-party secularists. Iraq’s only experience is Saddam and the Baath, ethnic cleavages, and theocratic absolutists.
Were US troops to disengage, there would be no spontaneous return to calm. The jihadis would surge, the police defect, and the Green Zone would become akin to Saigon ’75.
Consider the experience of Larry Diamond, of whom SF Chronicle writer J. Sterngold reported last April:
In another address to Iraqis in late March, Diamond called the transitional law, as the interim constitution is called, the right path to “a true democracy,” praised the spirit of compromise he found and promised the Iraqis that their nascent democracy would lead the Arab world.
But Diamond said it was around that time that the insurgency grew bolder, that more Americans and Iraqis began to die and that security appeared to be collapsing. He said he shuddered as he began to see other advisers getting killed on the same roads he traveled.
And then he had what he describes as a painful, transforming experience.
“I had one of those moments when you cut through all the bull,” he said. “I was speaking to this women’s group, and one woman got up and asked, “If we do all these things, who’s going to protect us?” Diamond recalled. “That was the moment when I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, some of these women are going to be assassinated because they are here listening to me.’ It just struck me between the eyes.”
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/25/MNGFA6AT1R1.DTL&type=printable
John et al., hi–
I’ve sat on a couple of panels with Larry Diamond. He knows so little about the Middle East it’s tragic! I wasn’t surprised when he bought into the early version of the Bremer Plan–nor, when he started dissociating himself from it. The fact that only toward the end of his time in Iraq he suddenly figured out the situation and fears of the women he was working with there speaks volumes about his ignorance going in…
I disagree with you when you say, Fair elections require years of trials and maturation of civic organizations and rules of play. India, Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico, Korea, and (now) S. Africa all had years of tutelage under single-party secularists… East Timor, Namibia, South Africa, Palestine (1996), and numerous other countries– all managed fair elections without any sign of “years of trials and maturation of civic organizations and rules of play”.
In South Africa, for example, the 88% of the population that was not white had never participated in any meaningful democratic elections prior to 1994. All they had known was centuries of colonial expropriation and silencing culminating in 40 years of apartheid repression. Also, at the time of the historic 1994 elections, there was still a near-active civil war inside KwaZulu-Natal that was only suspended briefly for a few days around the time of the elections… Inside the black communities, “necklacings” and other forms of coercion had been common…
And yet– they managed to have a free and fair election that year because of the sheer strength of their political will to do so, and because by the end of the period leading up to the election virtually all the parties were satisfied with the ‘terms of engagement’ for it…
That election was a real cliffhanger, from so many points of view! But they made it. So really, don’t talk about “years of trials and maturation of civic organizations and rules of play”. That wasn’t how it happened there, or in a number of other places.
Iraq, in addition, does have a distant (60-year-old) tradition of parliamentarism to draw on…
Actually, I’m not sure what the real political impact of your argument is. That the Iraqis aren’t “ready” for democracy so the US occupation rule should be prolonged? Is that it– or something else? Do tell.
Just a test
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