Building Democracy

In the aftermath of the Najaf peace deal, Matthew Yglesias is feeling rather helpless in looking at Iraq and Iran. What we may be seeing here is the sheer difficulty of trying to build democracy by force of arms. Military power can create situations in which democracy can grow, but that alone is not enough to do the job, even in cases like Iraq where I'm sure most people would like a true democracy to develop. This is why I'm less concerned about our possible pulling out of the country than I used to be. There are other armed groups that can create stability, though terrorism will likely be a problem for some time. The trick is to get as many of these groups on the same page as possible so that they will be working primarily to promote stability in areas where they are strong rather than fighting each other for control. Not all such groups are reachable - Muqtada Sadr may not be - but places like Colombia manage to pull off democratic elections despite an ongoing civil war. Furthermore, while we may not like all the groups who would participate in the process, sometimes we need to suck it up and have faith in the ballot box as an intrument of human governance. As Odo said in a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, "One of the dangers of giving people freedom of choice is that sometimes they make the wrong choice." All of this, however, depends more on diplomatic skill - including "diplomatic skill" of the rather unsavory kind we used to hold together the Afghan warlords in the run-up to our war against the Taliban. However, we have little room to manuever diplomatically given our current force posture in the country and our unpopularity with much of the population. This wouldn't matter so much if we could just forcibly control all Iraq, but we can't do that either. And this is the root of our present quandary.