DOMINOES OR SOLITAIRE?:

The Friedman Principle: The influential New York Times columnist's vision of spreading democracy through the Arab world is this era's domino theory—and it is just as misguided (Jack Beatty, October 29, 2003, The Atlantic)

There is a Vietnam shadow on Friedman's grand strategy. Not many Americans would have supported a war solely to secure the factitious independence of South Vietnam. It took the original domino theory to justify the deaths of so many U.S. soldiers and the expenditure of so much treasure: if we don't stop "them"—the forces of international communism—in Pleiku we'll have to fight them in Pasadena. (President Bush has said the same thing about the terrorists attacking our troops in Iraq.) In Syria, for one, the dominoes have been falling the wrong way. At the height of "major combat operations," Pentagon hawks made noises about an incursion into Syria. The House recently voted sanctions on Syria for its support for terrorists. The Syrian dictatorship has used the U.S. presence in Iraq and the increased U.S. pressure on terrorism to crack down. "The situation enables the regime to say there is a danger of war," Haitam Maleh, a human rights activist, told The Financial Times. "We estimate there have been over 700 new [political] prisoners over the past year."

Maximalist goals tend to sanction maximum sacrifices. Suppose our goal in Iraq was modest: call it tenable stability—broadly representative government—in one country. That would be consistent with our interests in the Gulf. The region's governments have never been democratic, but they have kept the oil flowing for more than fifty years.

Mr. Beatty's analogy here is almost totally inapt. Domino Theory proposed that if we did not defend pro-Western allies, allowing them to fall to Communist domination, the process would feed on itself and more would fall than if we fought to preserve these allies and contain the Soviet Union and its bloc. The validity of the theory is difficult to discern because both sides have feasible arguments. On the one hand, North Vietnam dragged down not just South Vietnam but Cambodia and, briefly, Laos. But neighboring states, like Thailand, survived easily. And, in an earlier war, the defense of South Korea preserved it to the present day.

Meanwhile, in places like Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Grenada, etc., where we got involved only after the first domino had fallen, communist expansion was certainly stopped dead. But you can always say it never existed beyond the borders of each state involved.

However, in the Middle East there is no first domino for us to defend. Every state in the region where Islam predominates needs to be radically reformed. Mr. Beatty's reduction of our national interest in the region to just keeping the oil flowing seems to ignore one factor that many of the rest of us regard as important: terrorism. The oil, after all, was flowing quite nicely in the region on 9-11, but that didn't save a soul in PA, the WTC or the Pentagon.

Even setting aside his hallucinatory implication that Syria was a free nation that has become less so because of the war, Mr. Beatty proposes that we aim for mere stability in one nation in the middle of a region where every government has completely failed the people. Poverty, powerlessness and regression may not be the "root causes" of terrorism, but assuredly they exacerbate it, no? As Ralph Peters wrote two years ago, stability in the Arab Middle East is our enemy; it should not be our goal.

The belief--associated most closely with the neoconservatives, but also with Mr. Friedman (sometimes)--that a stable, democratic, and prosperous Iraq is achievable and would serve as an attractive, even compelling, example to the rest of the region may well be a pipe dream, but it's hard to imagine that if a decent Iraq does somehow emerge that it will have no positive effect. In particular, if it can maintain a distinctly Islamic identity it could allay the justifiable fears of Muslims that they face a choice between either liberal democratic protestant capitalism or Islam.

Strangely enough, Mr. Beatty ends up calling for just such a "broadly representative" Iraq, though he adopts French means to get there, rather than our current policy. If his case is ultimately that we should try to attain our stated goal but expect less of it that Mr. Friedman does, that seems reasonable, but it hardly seems worth a column.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 1, 2003 7:20 AM