January 30, 2005
A VOICE FROM THE DECENT LEFT
Iraqis fight a lonely battle for democracy (Michael Ignatieff, The Observer, January 30th, 2005)
The election in Iraq is without precedent. Never, not even in the dying days of Weimar Germany, when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence - with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into hiding, foreign monitors forced to 'observe' from a nearby country, actual voting a gamble with death, and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates and exiles abroad.Just as depressing as the violence in Iraq is the indifference to it abroad. Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose their own leaders.
Why do so few people feel even a tremor of indignation when they see poll workers gunned down? Why isn't there a trickle of applause in the press for the more than 6,000 Iraqis actually standing for political office at the risk of their lives?
Explaining this morose silence requires understanding how support for Iraqi democracy has become the casualty of the corrosive bitterness that still surrounds the initial decision to go to war. Establishing free institutions in Iraq was the best reason to support the war - now it is the only reason - and for that very reason democracy there has ceased to be a respectable cause.
The Bush administration has managed the nearly impossible: to turn democracy into a disreputable slogan.
Liberals can't bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neo-conservative bombast. Anti-war ideologues can't support the Iraqis because that would require admitting that positive outcomes can result from bad policies. And then there are the ideological fools in the Arab world, and even a few in the West, who think the 'insurgents' are fighting a just war against US imperialism. This makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates - fascists.
What may also be silencing voices is the conventional wisdom that has been thrown over the debate on Iraq like a fire blanket - everyone believes that Iraq is a disaster; hence elections are doomed. As I was told by one European observer, all that remains is the final act. We are waiting, he said, for the helicopters to lift off the last Americans from the roofs of the green zone in Baghdad. For its part, the Bush administration sometimes seems to support the elections less to give the Iraqis a chance at freedom than to provide what Henry Kissinger, speaking of Vietnam, called 'a decent interval' before collapse.
Beneath the fire blanket of defeatism, everyone - for and against the war - is preparing exit strategies. Those who were against tell us that democracy cannot be imposed at gunpoint, when the actual issue is whether it can survive being hijacked at gunpoint.
Other experts tell us how 'basically' violent Iraqi society is, as a way of explaining why insurgency has taken root. A more subtle kind of condescension claims that Iraq has been scarred by Ba'athism and cannot produce free minds. All this savant expertise ignores the evidence that Iraqis want free institutions and that their leaders have fought to establish them in near-impossible circumstances.
One wonders how many millions of Westerners are today privately hoping democracy in Iraq will fail.
Those are "Westerners" by way of their place of residence only. Mentally, they've become brothers and sisters of Al Zarqawi.
Posted by: Peter at January 30, 2005 8:48 AMPeter just beat me to it: Westerners by geography only, not Men of the West, rather culture-traitors and folk-enemies.
Posted by: Lou Gots at January 30, 2005 9:17 AMBeg to differ.
This seemingly even-handed, soulful, profound- sounding screed, notwithstanding its measured, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tones, continues to hit all of those same old low notes: villifying the US (and its allies) and ridiculing Bush.
It is a well-disguised effort, this "equal time" attack on all parties; for while Ignatieff gets in some decent (and certainly justified) shots at the anti-war liberal west, his argument, replete with post-hoc moralizing, goes out of its way to refuse to acknowledge that there are more heroes in this story than just those Iraqis who have risked their lives trying to bring normalcy to their country.
One would like to ask him, "Who exactly is it, that has enabled these Iraqis to reach the state of risking their lives to try to bring normalcy to their country?"
So that while Ignatieff may appear to be breaking new ground, it is not enough at this stage of the game to attack all parties equally while refusing to acknowledge the credit due to the Bush administration for having achieved what it has in Iraq.
No less pernicious is Ignatieff's focus on "exit strategy" as the ultimate equalizer between the Bush Administration and those who oppose US policy in Iraq; that is, between an administration that will have to decide when (if)it is right to leave the Iraqi government to its own devices and those who are waiting with great expectations for the US to run from Iraq with its tail between its legs.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at January 30, 2005 10:03 AM"The Bush administration has managed the nearly impossible: to turn democracy into a disreputable slogan.
Liberals can't bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neo-conservative bombast."
It is not Bush's fault that so many liberals would rather risk being seen as standing with Zarqawi than risk being seen as standing with Bush.
The "bitterness" is not the fault of both sides. It is the fault of those who choose to wallow in it - the liberals and the left.
Posted by: ralph phelan at January 30, 2005 10:39 AMHmm. So the elections not too long along in Columbia where leading candidates were killed by terrorists, how exactly do they not count as someone making a concerted effort to disrupt the election via violence?
Posted by: John Thacker at January 30, 2005 11:02 AMAs I was told by one European observer, all that remains is the final act. We are waiting, he said, for the helicopters to lift off the last Americans from the roofs of the green zone in Baghdad. --
Ain't gonna happen this time. W can't get re-elected. LBJ had hoped to.
Ignatieff thinks that the Bush administration turned democracy into a disreputable term? He forgets that in 1991 the whole "world community" choose not to remove Saddam. Saving Iraq would have been much easier back then. They wasted that chance because all of them preferred "stability". Spreading democracy was considered dangerous and naive back then.
Back in the seventies, my geography teacher told me that a country as big as China simply cannot be ruled democratically. I hear stuff like that all the time. Nothing has changed.
Elected leaders all over the world are risk averse. They very rarely speak about replacing tyrannies with democracy, and they do even less to achieve it, precisely because it is not popular. Even Bush was against "nation building" before 9/11. That he changed is quite extraordinary. Ignatieff must understand that the only choice at hand is between "neoconservative bombast" or business as usual.
Posted by: werner at January 30, 2005 12:55 PM