WHY SHOULD I CARE WHAT THEIR LIVES ARE LIKE?:

Muscular Utopianism: I used to be a liberal interventionist. Now I'm a realist. (DAVID RIEFF, April 3, 2005, Opinion Journal)

In his 2005 State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of America's "generational commitment to the advance of freedom," and predicted that "the victory of freedom in Iraq [would] inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran." These were sweeping claims, but in the wake of the Iraqi elections and the massive anti-Syrian mobilization in Lebanon even many erstwhile opponents of the war and skeptics about American motives in the Middle East, from Sen. Ted Kennedy to Piero Fassino, the head of one of Italy's main left-wing parties, have conceded that the Bush administration has been proven correct in its fundamental approach. Only within two constituencies, the extreme left and the so-called realists (many of whom served in President Bush's father's administration), has skepticism about both the wisdom of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the prospects for American success continued to predominate.

As someone who in the 1990s would probably have called himself a liberal interventionist, and who has come increasingly aligned with the realist position, I am well aware that this is not a moment when critiques of the triumphalist account of what American power has wrought in the world is likely to win many converts. [...]

[My] doubts have two sources: the actual degree of success the U.S. has attained in Iraq and in the Middle East, and, far more importantly, the wisdom of such engagements, whether or not they succeed.

First, a little proportion about Iraq. Even those who view the country's progress from the most optimistic perspective tend to unite in crediting Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's majority Shiites, with having held the country together and used his commanding authority to legitimize January's democratic elections. Ayatollah Sistani's own medieval views on subjects ranging from Sharia law to the status of women are presented as being of little concern. "You can't get to Thomas Jefferson without first having Martin Luther," is the way the conservative Middle Eastern specialist, Reuel Marc Gerecht, once put it to me.

Historical analogies (and their 300-year lag times) aside, there is at least as compelling an alternate scenario: That what Ayatollah Sistani has done is used the democratic process to secure power for the Shiite community. In other words, that it is less that he and his fellow ayatollahs in Najaf share Washington's project of democratizing the Middle East so much as the Bush administration's commitment to initiate the vast project of a social transformation of a whole region by force of arms happened to dovetail with Shiite political ambitions and that the moment these interests no longer dovetail, it will become clear what kind of Iraqi society American blood and treasure has really brought into being. And that is assuming the war against the insurgency really is being won: The fact that two years after Saddam Hussein's fall the road to the Baghdad airport is still not fully controlled by U.S. forces and Iraq is still importing oil suggests that the outcome is still very much in doubt.

Beyond Iraq, on the broader Middle East, there are also real questions about whether Lebanon is headed for democracy or civil war, and whether the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will lead to peace or a carve-up of the West Bank that will make a third intifada a virtual certainty in the not too distant future.

But even if all these outcomes are more positive than I expect them to be, after prolonged stays both in Israel-Palestine and postwar Iraq, there is the more fundamental question of whether this "generational commitment to the advance of freedom," to which the Bush administration has committed the country, is a wise or a feasible course. Does the lack of democracy in the world really pose the kind of existential threat to the U.S. that most Americans believed the Soviet empire did during the Cold War?

No. But the Soviets and Nazis and Imperialists didn't pose an existential threat either. We reform the world because we are a Crusader State, not because we fear it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 3, 2005 5:51 PM