Readers who follow the debates that Cliff and I (among others) occasionally wade into at NRO's spirited blog, the Corner, may have seen that a discussion has been underway for a couple of days about why we are in Iraq and how much it is worth pressing on.
For those interested, I weighed in last night, finding a lot of common ground with John Derbyshire (aka, "Derb"). My post follows. It is an old position, but it is one I feel reconfirmed in after my online debate earlier this week with Mansoor Ijaz on the question whether Islam can be reformed. I'll have more to say about why in the coming days.
FWIW, I am in the Derb camp to the extent that I would never have gone to Iraq for the purpose of trying to democratize it.
First, I don’t think Iraq – or any Islamic country that is determined to remain an Islamic country – has any inclination to democratize in the sense that we would recognize as democracy.
Second, even if it did, the administration has never made the case – and I don’t think it can – that democracy in a foreign country makes America safer from terrorists. (To the contrary, there is a lot of evidence of terrorists using democracies to threaten the U.S.) The people who say otherwise simply refuse to face up to the fact that the lack of democracy is not the cause of Islamic terrorism, and therefore the advent of democracy cannot be the cure.
We went to Iraq to depose Saddam because he was thought a threat to our national security. The administration inexplicably short-sold the abundant case of his facilitation of Islamic terrorism (such that when one asks the logical question “What does Iraq have to do with al Qaeda or the War on Terror?” most Americans – and even administration officials – seem to be without a very good answer). When WMD were not found, the conventional wisdom calcified that we had no good reason to be in Iraq in the first place. The less likely finding WMD became, the more democratizing Iraq was stressed as a noble reason for the war. But this shifting of priorities should not confuse us: democratizing Iraq is not a cause we would ever have gone to war over.
If we are in Iraq now because we have the terrorists collected there and we are taking the opportunity to mow down as many as we can, that’s a good reason to press on. That would provide a big improvement in our security.
But if we are there primarily to try to turn Iraq into a democracy that is a big mistake. We should make it as stable as reason allows, then leave. As far as democracy is concerned: (a) even if we hunker down for a decade or two, whether it can happen is dubious at best; (b) whether, if it does happen, we will be safer is even more questionable; (c) the American people don’t care whether Iraq is a democracy as long as it doesn’t threaten the American people (we would take an America-friendly monarch over an Iran-friendly “democracy” any day); and (d) if the American people think the price tag of taking necessary action in furtherance of their own security now includes staying in hard places for extra years, and losing extra lives and extra hundreds of billions of dollars, all on a dubious theory that the Islamic world will democratize and thus make us safer, they will shrink from taking those necessary actions. That makes us much less safe.
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