A few Rice links

you are sad

I think while Condi is mugging for the cameras, Clarke is going to pull a foreign object from his trunks….! Katy, bar the door…this one is just getting started!

I remember as a college student being really puzzled by politics, and wondering how people could make such passionate, detailed arguments saying exactly opposite things, until I realized that (in politics, anyway, unlike boxing maybe) there is no such thing as objective truth. So I decided to go to law school instead of grad school, and now I believe whatever I get paid to believe.

The most remarkable thing Rice said was NOT about the past but about the future.

Rice’s testimony repeated Bush’s statement that the way to deal with the deep anti-Americanism of the Muslim world is to install democracy.

Previously, she said, the US had turned a blind eye toward tyranny in the mideast — no longer.

Points:

1. If the US project in Iraq results in peace, prosperity and democracy in the mideast, or even just in Iraq, then George W Bush will go down as one of the greatest statemen in US history.

2. Result #1 is highly counter-intuitive. However, I would gladly eat crow on this issue.

3. This Democracy Project raises the question of how far-reaching a policy the President has the authority to create. This democracy project is big enough to span decades and cost billions more.

4. The democracy project is the Bush administration answer to the charge that fighting in the mideast will only enflame the Arabs.

5. By the way, I think the “Enflame” argument is often bogus. It’s arguing that we should not fight our enemies because they might get angry!

6. There is always a chance that the Democracy approach is just a convenient thing to say to try to sound good on TV.

norbizness, the only detectable firing offense in this administration is truth.

Incompetancy and negligence are OK. Corruption is the purpose of the administration, so it’s more than OK.

Rice’s answer (the Democracy Project) unfortunately translates simply into: “when the Arabs look and feel exactly like us there will be no more terrorism.”

Very, very well put. The unspoken underlying view behind the “mission civilisatrice” excuse for the occupation is that there is something fundamentally wrong with Arab societies and Arabs themselves which the US has the right to try to fix, by force of necessary. If they are ungrateful we have the right to shoot them.

Unfortunately for everyone, a large part of our country seems to be in sympathy with this highly self-flattering fallacious view.

I guess I’ll just make the obvious point. There is something fundamentally wrong with Arab societies. I wouldn’t say the US has the right to try to fix them. But there is a complicated question at work here. You cannot, in all seriousness, believe that western-style democracy (whether of the social democracy variant or otherwise) is good in any sense that matters deeply and not believe that it is good for all people. Otherwise you’re just saying your politics are a matter of taste, roughly analogous to saying “Americans like hamburgers, Arabs like hummous.” If you believe that western-style democracy — an admittedly broad term, but one that I think we can sketch the broad outlines of pretty easily –is good, then Arab societies are appalling. People there — especially women, but generally just about everyone — are living under conditions that are simply unacceptable.

So, if you believe that something is deeply wrong, and you have the ability to change it, should you sit by and do nothing?

The “look to the beam in your own eye” first argument doesn’t work here. America and Europe’s democratic and economic structures are certainly flawed (in different ways). But they’re vastly superior to anything in the Arab world. Nor does the “why intervene there if you’re not intervening in Pakistan, Congo, Liberia, etc.” argument fly, either. You shouldn’t refrain from stopping your next-door neighbor from beating up his girlfriend because you might not do the same the next time it happens.

None of this means that what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq really has/had anything to do with bringing Western-style democracy to the Middle East. But if it did, I’m far from convinced that it was the wrong thing to do. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it was a possible thing to do. It may be that fundamentalist Islam — which assumes that the law has been determined once for all, and therefore does not and cannot be changed by human vote –is irreconcilable with genuine democracy, which assumes that people should always be free to change the rules under which they live. But the idea that we should respect Arab political and social arrangements out of some notion of multiculturalism seems to me deeply flawed, both philosophically and practically.

Steve Carr,
I don’t know enough about Arab societies to comment on them, but I’d like to discuss your assertion that Western style democracy cannot be good unless it is good for all people. I don’t agree with your principle; as a matter of fact, I think this belief is symptomatic of a problem with Bush foreign policy. Here are a few problems I see.

First of all, when you say “Western Democracy”, which model do you mean? There is quite a bit of variation. These range from the difference between the parliamentary system and the U.S. structure; the lack of a bill of rights in the UK; the higher value placed on social welfare spending in Sweden than the U.S., etc.
I don’t think you can gloss these over as trivial.

Next, I really don’t see the fundamental principle that says Western Democracy —whatever that may be—is necessarily the best form of government. If there is a core value the two of us share, I think it is the belief in self-determination, and elections are obviously a way of achieving this.
If you’re only speaking of a belief in a self-determative process, then I’m with you—but our system is much much more.
Our political system is closely tied with certain economic values—belief in the free market and consumerism—that do not appear to be universal or even always beneficial. I don’t know why a people can’t choose to have a government that has more of a religious flavor and still be self-determinative. I wouldn’t care to live in such a country, but if the other values are reasonable, I wouldn’t mind so much.

I guess I’m ramblinb a bit. I think your point is worth discussing. I hope some other people can take it up.

Marky, I agree that the differences between, say, Swedish-style social democracy and the U.S.’ brand of free-market democracy are not trivial. But I do think that there are core principles that are fairly easy to agree on (even if they weren’t embraced by most Western democracies until fairly recently): suffrage for all adults; regularly scheduled elections; freedom of the press, speech, and religion; education open to all, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion; no legal discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender, or ethnicity; and, finally, a shared assumption that laws need to be revisable (so it’s not one man, one vote, one time). There may be other criteria you would want to add, but roughly speaking I’d say that any society that started from these principles would be better, for all human beings, than an authoritarian one or a clerically-ruled (whether Christian, Islamic, or Jewish) one.

But I do think that there are core principles that are fairly easy to agree on … suffrage for all adults.

Given the amount of effort the GOP has put into making sure that isn’t the case in the USA, in passing and over-enforcing laws against felons, even _released_ felons, voting, I’m not sure that it should be taken for granted that this is a bedrock principle of Western Democracy.

Brian, I guess I’d say that what the GOP has done and is trying to do in Florida and elsewhere is oppose democracy.

As for conditions in Iraq today, it’s no argument to say that conditions during an ongoing war or during the occupation after it (depending on where you think we are in the process) are worse than they were beforehand, so therefore that’s evidence that conditions beforehand weren’t so bad. Life for most Germans was a lot worse in from 1945-1947 than it was from 1933-1943. No serious person would argue that the Germans weren’t better off afterward than they were under Hitler. Same goes for Japan.

And what’s with the link to a column about Srebrenica? I don’t think Serbia tells us much about what Western secular democracies are like. And frankly, I don’t know why you’re bothering. You can’t honestly believe that, for the most majority of people, Arab societies are more tolerant, more free, or better places to live in than Western democracies. Just admit that and then we can argue about whether trying to impose democracy from without makes any sense.

Finally, if the U.S. had intervened to stop the Hutus from massacring the Tutsis in Rwanda, that would have constituted an attempt to “change a society through violence.” Are you honestly arguing that the U.S. would have been unjustified in doing so?

I think the last word it that steve Carr’s argument is moot.
This administration did not enter Iraq with the best of intentions, and they couldn’t even carry out their plans. Once Garner (who seemed like a good deal for the Iraqis) was fired, the emphasis was on privatizing Iraq’s economy, for the good of Bush and Chalabi’s cronies. Democracy also took a back seat to stratagems designed to keep the Shiites from gaining power.

My view of the war is that Bush’s obsession with invading Iraq gave everyone else in the administration an opportunity to pursue their own private goals.
There was no coordination from the top, so we saw conflicting operations, backstabbing and chaos. Rumsfeld in particular seems more interested in making Powell fail than Iraq succeed.

I find myself agreeing with Steve Carr that there something shared by all Western Democracies, however different they are from one another, and that that shared core is a good thing, probably the best thing ever devised for maximizing justice and liberty. Which is not to say, obviously, that it works like a well-oiled machine, maximising good automatically like a thermostat or an invisible hand. Everyone knows it’s rickety and prone to errors and breakdowns, and there is no democrat who has not at some point daydreamed about how much better things would be if only everyone would listen to…me. As the old saying goes, democracy sucks, but the alternatives are worse.

Now here’s the rub. I think that the most import thing that Western democracies share, the element that uniquely characterizes them and without which democracy is an empty electoral ritual, is suspicion amounting to paranoia about the capacity for evil that dwells both in individual men and women and in organizations and institutions both private and public.

Notice that in one way or another every Western democracy incorporates something like the notion of seperation of powers. How come? Because Western democrats know in their bones that no one, and no group, can aquire power past a certain threshold (we can’t define when that threshold is reached but we know it when we see it) without destructively metastasizing–without becoming a cancer in the body politic. And the only way to prevent that is to build in countervailing institutions that are in one degree or another always battling it out.

Isn’t it a paradox when that kind of society, with those kinds of assumptions, attempts to impose its will on another land with very different assumptions?

The democratic imperialist says, Question authority, value dissent, don’t let any group or institution get too powerful–but do what we say or else. As I recall, it didn’t work for the Athenians either.

High-minded talk aside, is there anyone who believes for a minute that the asses of evil, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, have any interest whatsoever in preserving democracy here, much less exporting it there?

Or are you saying, as you seem to have been, that we should never have toppled Saddam in the first place?

You are right. I was against the invasion of Iraq, for many reasons. First, it was a violation of international law. Worse, it was done as the expression of Bush’s new National Security doctrine that says the US alone has the right to violate international law in that manner. Second, I didn’t believe that Saddam posed a threat to us or to his neighbors. Remember, the countries bordering on Iraq did not want the US to invade. Third, I thought the US was singularly unqualified to manage the reconstruction of Iraq because of our lack of understanding, and in fact contempt for Arabs and Islam. I think I have been shown to be right on all of those points, at least to my own satisfaction.

to argue that because Saddam was born in Iraq, he had a right not to be toppled by the United States (which is, when it comes down to it, what you’re saying) is, at best, perplexing.

See the point on international law above. William Pfaff, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, described the Bush National Security Strategy, under which we invaded Iraq, as the most radical challenge to the principle of state sovereignty since the Communist Manifesto.

I don’t think that I can’t appreciate what’s good about Arab culture. But frankly, whether I do or not doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is that the mission to make Arab countries into democracies — as defined above — is the right one, and it’s the right one regardless of what Arab culture is like. I don’t believe there’s anything inherent in Arab culture that is inimical to democracy, full-fledged political rights for women, and a rejection of theocracy. But if there is, it’s the culture that has to change, not these ideals.

So you don’t know what Arab culture is like, but nonetheless you know that what we have is better. So much better that we have the right to force it on the Arabs. Once again, I have to point out the complete incoherence of your line of reasoning. If you suppose that you can carry an argument, let alone transform a society that you dislike, through such reasoning you are much mistaken.

So how you can argue you didn’t link to a column about Srebrenica?

The column wasn’t about Srebrenica. Srebrenica is mentioned in one sentence. I suggest that you actually read the article.