MORE LIKE A NEEDFUL GAMBLE:

Democracy Doesn't Come First (Thomas Sowell, 7/18/07, National Review)

[W]e tried to create democracy in Iraq before we created the security — the law and order — that is a prerequisite for any form of viable government.

Having made democracy the centerpiece of the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, Americans have been hamstrung by the inadequacies of that government and the fact that our military could not simply ignore the Iraqi government when its politicians got in the way of restoring law and order.

People will support tyranny before they will support anarchy. Both can be avoided by creating an interim government based on competence, rather than on its being an embodiment of democratic ideals.

Neither in Europe nor in Asia did today’s democracies begin as democracies. As late as 1950, no one could have called Taiwan or South Korea democracies.

Even today, Singapore does not have the kind of freedom that Westerners regard as democratic. But it is a decent and prosperous society, vastly superior in every way to what it was at the end of World War II.

Trying to create democracy in places where it has never existed — and where the prerequisites for democracy may not exist — has been a needless gamble.

While it was obvious, in 2003, that we should stand up a semi-authoritarian transitional regime, supported by Ali Sistani, and hand over sovereignty immediately, it's hard to quibble with the Americanism that motivated attempts to create a democratic multi-confessional regime instead. Just because the Sunni have shot themselves in the foot repeatedly and fostered conditions that make a more oppressive and exclusionary Shi'a regime a logical next step does not mean that they had to do so. It was easy to underestimate how completely they'd bought into Saddam's propaganda about their being a majority in Iraq. The reality that they are a mere fraction of the population just dawned too late to stifle the futile resistance movement, so it has to be beaten into submission.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 19, 2007 6:16 AM