In the end, the validity of the neoconservative position, or for that matter of the indictment against it, rests on two issues that go beyond Iraq: whether and how the U.S. should try to spread democracy in the Middle East, and whether we should be engaged in a war against terrorism.
On the first count, Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own, “Marxist” approach to democratization, his former friends and allies had behaved like “Leninists.”
By this he means to separate his analysis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) from the policies to which that analysis seminally contributed. In writing about the “end of history,” Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to democracy.
But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he tired of waiting for Marx’s predicted revolution, so had the neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization.
The analogy may be catchy, but it is flawed. The socialism envisioned by Marx was a fantasy, which came true neither by natural evolution nor by Lenin’s violence. Democracy, on the other hand, is the method by which governments are chosen today in about two-thirds of the countries of the world, and this is something that has come about via both the “Marxist” and the “Leninist” paths.
In the technologically advanced countries of Europe, democracy in the postwar era may arguably have developed organically, as the outgrowth of socio-economic development. But the majority of today’s democracies are not technologically advanced; democracy came to them because people wanted it and worked or fought for it.
In other words, it has been a product of individual choice and will. And though most of its proponents have been indigenous, outsiders have often played influential roles.
In fact, even in the advanced countries, postwar democracy did not just unfold naturally. There, too, it came with the help of various kinds of foreign intervention, whether it was the Allied occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria, or the CIA’s interventions in the politics of Italy and France, or the role played by the Marshall Plan across Western Europe.
For that matter, America’s own democracy was born with outside assistance from the likes of Lafayette and the government of France. It turns out that we are all “Leninists.”
The strategy of promoting democracy in the Middle East flowed from Bush’s realization that the war against terror could not be won by military means alone. Bush eschewed the old cliché that the “root cause” of terror was poverty, a theory always contradicted by the available evidence and one that should have received its final blow this past summer from the appearance of a cell of terrorist physicians in the United Kingdom.
Instead, Bush hypothesized that the root cause was the political culture of the Muslim Middle East, which is steeped in violence. This political culture has incubated thousands of young men ready to die for the joy of killing and tens of millions of citizens ready to applaud their “martyrdom.”
Bush’s thesis was, and is, that the Middle East can be brought to partake in the global tide of democratization that has touched every other region, and that such democratization will lead to new ways of thinking and make violence less acceptable.
Neither Bush nor anyone else can know if this strategy will work. There are two obvious areas of uncertainty. One has been expressed well by Kesler:
The conspicuous exception to democracy’s spread was the Arab Middle East. That could have meant, as the neoconservatives concluded, that its turn was next. But it could also have meant that there were cultural, religious, and political factors that had made it resistant to the democratic wave—and would continue to do so.
Kesler here makes the neoconservatives sound more assertive and uniform than I think is fair, but he is certainly right that we do not know whether Arabs will in fact embrace democracy any time soon or, for that matter, ever.
And we also do not know—we can only suppose and hope—that if they do, democracy will work to pacify Arab political culture. That is the second uncertainty.
Was it irresponsible of Bush to rest such weighty national concerns on an unproved supposition? It would have been irresponsible had there been any better-tested or more plausible alternatives available. But none has yet been suggested, unless one counts those who persist in believing that stronger U.S. efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will solve everything else.
(If that were the case, attacks on America should have subsided during the 1990’s, the decade of our most vigorous efforts to broker just such a peace; instead, they crescendoed.)
Thus far, Bush’s strategy has scored some steps forward and some back. All in all, as Freedom House reported this year, “the Middle East continues to lag behind other regions in the development of free institutions.”
But, the Freedom House report immediately continues, “the fact that progress has been made since the September 11, 2001 attacks gives some cause for optimism.” Although no country in the region (apart from Israel) can be judged “free,” the number counted as “partly free” (as opposed to “not free”) has risen from 3 to 6 (or 7 if one counts the Palestinian Authority).
If appreciable progress is to come, it will require more years, which is why Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks of “a generational commitment.”
