For Non-Lethal Democratization
The critical phrase in Professor Piki Ish-Shalom's valuable posting is "That does not mean that we need to force democracy at gun point." He is surely right that the Neocons gave democracy promotion a bad name. I could not agree more that the ideal of democratization should not be abandoned. The problem, as his key sentence helps us to remember, is that the language traps us, because the phrase "democracy promotion" covers both coerced democratization (which is what regime change means, at least in the Neocon world) and non-lethal support of democratization.
I, like Professor Piki Ish-Shalom, am all in favor of promoting democracy by educational, persuasive means, and indicated how this may be done in Security First. It is the violent type of promotion that I object to.
We should not help cause hundreds of thousands of casualties in order to topple a regime--especially when we have no way to determine what will replace it.
Note that now, success in Iraq is on all lips because the level of violence is down. Most agree that the pacification is fragile, but it may hold. However, anyone who expects Iraq to be a democracy should not hold their breath. At best we shall have a Putin-like authoritarian regime, which is very likely to be anti-American, may well ally itself with Iran, and may invite French and Russian oil companies to play a key role in the Iraqi economy. Is this worth dieing for?
Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University. For more discussion, see Security First (Yale 2007). To contact him, write comnet@gwu.edu.
www.securityfirstbook.com
In his first post, Etzioni did more than simply say that he doesn't support coerced democracy. He actually advocated using US military force in conjunction with undemocratic forces in Afghanistan such as the tribal warlords who we once found useful because they opposed the Taliban.
It's not enough to stand against democracy at gunpoint. You also have to stand against the US using its military might in the service of undemocratic regimes.
September 23, 2008 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
What happened to your first post Dr. Etzioni?
September 23, 2008 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Progressives" are all for human rights and democracy around the world. So when the neo-cons adopted the idea in Iraq, they suddenly went ballistic and said it was a terrible idea. Dr Etzioni says he is for "education" to democracy, but not "imposition at gun point".
How would Dr Etzioni have promoted democracy by "education" in Saddam Hussein's Iraq? I am obviously not advocating having the US or NATO invade countries whose level of democracy is not exactly to our liking, but I see a lot of hypocrisy here on the side of the "progressives".
It is fine for "progressive" Clinton to bomb the Serbs, it is a cheap way to "impose human rights by force" since he knew the Serbs wouldn't fight back. But what about the tougher cases?
September 23, 2008 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Progressives, or any that deserve to be called so, do not support humanitarian intervention. It was many deluded souls in the Democratic Party and its neocon wing that supported Clinton's intervention upon a defenseless Serbia. You are correct to call them on their hypocrisy. But do not accuse the new Democrats out on this -- we just finished a long fight in the primaries defeating those right wing Democrats.
September 23, 2008 6:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it's probably fair to say that enough ink has been spilled bashing neo-cons. Moreover, given recent events, isolationism seems to be a more pressing danger.
Going along with the consensus view (with the apparent exception of Stephen Schwartz-- http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/23/response_to_etzioni_and_ishsha/#more), Etzioni justifiably criticizes the over-ambitious neocon agenda and its execution in Iraq. Notably, he also maintains (above) that he is neither opposed to democratization as such, nor (in his book) of humanitarian military intervention as such, only where the two are combined. This crucial qualification of his argument differentiates his "security first" position significantly from an isolationist "America-first" one.
But, stepping back from the world of academic/theoretical/moral/ideal foreign policy theorizing, I wonder if Etzioni believes that the US is actually capable or likely to work such qualifications into their foreign policy. Given the current financial crisis, it seems increasingly likely that foreign policy isolationism will seize the day.
As Thomas Friedman, writing in yesterday's Times, conjectures:
"After a decade of the world being afraid of too much American power, it is now going to be treated to a world of too little American power, as we turn inward to get our house back in order."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/opinion/24friedman.html?hp)
If this is indeed the case, and given Etzioni's professed support for some humanitarian intervention and non-lethal democratization, perhaps the time has come for him to re-emphasize the other side of his argument and get off the neo-con bashing bandwagon.
September 24, 2008 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink