Iraq and Afghanistan

Noah Feldman has recently published a courageous book entitled What We Owe Iraq : War and the Ethics of Nation Building. As one of the advisors in Iraq after the beginning of the occupation and as an authority on Iraq and Islam, Feldman brings to the task an impressive resumé. His argument is that whatever the mistakes and misjudgments that we made in going into Iraq when and how we did, we now have a moral obligation to stay and complete the task of building democracy in Iraq, but only by adhering to some rather different rules than previous colonizers. Whatever we do we must create stability and security. After that we can assist the many factions in the country to work out their differences and fears through democratic processes.

I am sympathetic to the argument. But Feldman is unfortunately stuck with “democracy” as the only acceptable outcome for Iraq because our generation has not learned any other way of thinking about political alternatives for countries harder to govern than our own. In his own presentation he points to Somalia and Haiti as cases of American and international failure to live up to their trusteeship responsibilities. I would assume that he would think that less than democratic regimes in these countries might be preferable to what they have now. But he has no tools to thinks about such regimes, and so fails to make them part of the discussion.

What people everywhere, and especially in the less developed world, crave more than the institutions of democracy as we understand them are security, stability, legitimate government, and freedom (understood as independence or autonomy). The people of the two Kurdish enclaves in Iraq, for example, have governments that we often hold up as examples and that probably satisfy their people to a reasonable extent. Yet neither is really a democracy. Neither is likely to vote out of local power their entrenched party and personal leaders. The parties will see to this. Further afield, the people of China are coming to challenge the rest of the world on all fronts, economically and even in terms of “soft power”. Yet China does not have a democracy. Its people accept the regime because it is Chinese (therefore “free”) and legitimate in their eyes (a vague and yet apparently meaningful concept). China appears fully accepted by Washington. The communist government of Mongolia before the collapse of the USSR ruled as an authoritarian communist party. Yet it modernized its people and offered services unheard of in the developing world. Everyone I talked to in the early nineties in Ulan Bator was amazed how modernized the Mongolians were. Sexual equality was well advanced. This contrasted remarkably with the way of life and services offered by “democracies” that I was visiting at the same time, such as the Dominican Republic, India, or Guyana.

All of which suggests that regardless of our pretensions, we would be doing an important service to the Iraqi people if we left behind a free, stable, secure, and legitimate Iraqi government regardless of the extent to which it reflected the standards of a modern liberal democracy. Perhaps the best way to get independence, legitimacy, stability, and security is through the establishment of effective democratic institutions. But we should remember that these institutions are merely means to the broader goal of leaving behind a responsible Iraqi state that serves its people.