I just finished listening to Barack Obama’s address at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Text and audio available at the link. It’s well worth listening to.
There were both things I agreed with and disagreed with in what he had to say. I disagree, for example, with phased re-deployment. I’d have no objection to withdrawing our forces based on milestones achieved in Iraq but I think that the “precise levels and dates†he calls for inevitably means that withdrawal has become an end unto itself de-coupled from other U. S. interests. I think it’s completely inconsistent with another of his statements:
Make no mistake – if the Iranians and Syrians think they can use Iraq as another Afghanistan or a staging area from which to attack Israel or other countries, they are badly mistaken. It is in our national interest to prevent this from happening. We should also make it clear that, even after we begin to drawdown forces, we will still work with our allies in the region to combat international terrorism and prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. It is simply not productive for us not to engage in discussions with Iran and Syria on an issue of such fundamental importance to all of us.
The 140,000 troops we have in Iraq are the primary means we have for achieving that end. Can we rely on others to secure that objective for us?
Among the things that I agreed with:
Many who supported the original decision to go to war in Iraq have argued that it has been a failure of implementation. But I have long believed it has also been a failure of conception – that the rationale behind the war itself was misguided. And so going forward, I believe there are strategic lessons to be learned from this as we continue to confront the new threats of this new century.
Specifically, I think the timeframe for securing what is certainly a desireable goal and the actual conditions in Iraq were misgauged, unachieveable in a timeframe that the political support would allow.
Although I don’t believe that installing a workable liberal democracy in Iraq was doable with the level of force we were willing to exert, this:
The first is that we should be more modest in our belief that we can impose
democracy on a country through military force.
is wrong as a matter of historical fact. Like it or not it is possible to install liberal democracy at the point of a gun (we did it in Japan). But the domestic political conditions in the United States and the circumstances of Japan’s defeat were very, very different and I don’t honestly see our placing entire nations under existential threat, installing military governments, and writing their constitutions for them as part of a process of democratization today and particularly not in a country as diverse and fractious as Iraq.
Still the speech (and the following question-and-answer session) are worth listening to.
Hi Dave:
I don’t think Obama’s last point is wrong as a matter of historical fact–he states “we should be more modest”, not that democratization through military intervention can NEVER be done. This is a statement that I would stand up and cheer. We (not necessarily you) have been mislead by our reliance on the post-WWII experiences of Japan and Germany to believe that democratization can effectively be catalyzed by military intervention. The problem is twofold.
First, as you point out, the context of our democracy projects in the 1940s are very dissimilar to what we face today. Second, the record of democratization through military intervention is quite poor (as is the stability of ANY post-intervention regime according to the data, regardless of regime type). Both of these points should, at the least, cause policy-makers and citizens to be more modest in the belief that we can set off democratic dominoes through military intervention.
I thought it was a needless swipe. Don’t take me as an apologist for the Bush Administration but I think that the position they were sold was that democracy will naturally follow when a tyrant is displaced. My own view is that’s fatuous; the matter depends on local conditions.
Nonetheless I’m more comfortable with a U. S. that occasionally removes an autocrat than with one that will never do so under any circumstances (or at least as we’re not attacked directly).
The interpretation I took from Obama’s comment was that modesty should prevent us from attempts at democratization of which military force is a part under any circumstances.
I don’t think that was is point at all–modesty should give us pause, greater pause than we have displayed in recent years, for such operations. And I don’t think they were ‘sold’ anything. They were the ones doing the selling–their own unfounded beliefs about the causal relationship is to blame for our current problems IMO.