Empire Revisited

May 23, 2004

I’ve been looking through older material, and I hit this post written in October of 2002: We’re Building Empire.

Saddam’s power is the only thing holding the Iraqi state together. When Saddam dies, there will be no Iraq. The Iraqis will be “free” to kill each other. How does anyone bring democracy to that? You can only increase the chaos. Before democracy, we will have to bring order to the chaos … we’ll have to put in place a puppet government police-state anathema to our ideals. We’ll have to pretend to be Soviet. It will probably be impossible to do this.

For the moment, we seem to have united the Iraqis against us. So at least that kind of chaos isn’t there (yet). And my pessimism about our ability to become Soviet seems a little misplaced. We turned out to be much better at that than I expected.

Of course, It’s not the kind of credit I think any of us wanted on our national résumé.

Beyond that, though, what’s happening in Iraq is not a surprise. We said Bush didn’t have a plan for establishing democracy once he got rid of Saddam, and he didn’t. And we said he didn’t have the will to see through the Iraqi reconstruction, and he doesn’t. And we said it will create more terrorists, and it undoubtedly has. And we said it’d create more chaos in the middle east, and it has. And we said that a President not dedicated to the principals of Democracy at home was the wrong President to be building Democracies abroad.

The response to all of this was hand-wringing over possible WMD attacks and pearl-clutching faux-indignation over the allegedly racist notion that the Iraqis couldn’t appreciate democracy imposed on them at gunpoint.

Posted in War