Isolationism and Democracy

According to this review by Mark Leonard of four books on Iraqi reconstruction, the phrase 'drinking the Kool-Aid' has become popular in the Green Zone to describe 'the collective process of self-delusion and groupthink that has led otherwise effective people to lurch from blunder to blunder.' We are doubtful any degree of clear thinking could have made the intervention a success. Not only was it a violation of the principle of self-determination, but as a historical matter, democracy arises through the efforts of the people themselves.

But that's not the most important point. Although he spends more than three thousand words discussing how unrealistic and uninformed thinking produced the instability in Iraq, Leonard ends his review with "the fear that the failed experiment of this generation of American democracy-builders will leave behind successors drunk on a different kind of Kool-Aid. Theirs could be laced not with hubris, but the even deadlier poison of isolationism." This is real absurdity. Isolationism has always been a hobgoblin of the foreign policy establishment, and it has never been a historical reality, not even in its supposed 'heyday' in the 1920s and 30s. There's certainly no historical evidence that other 'failures' like Korea and Vietnam produced real isolationism. If anything, it produced a renewed impulse towards intervening in the affairs of others just to prove that we could - what was Grenada about?

Leonard, like many others, resolutely refuses to draw the conclusions that follow from the evidence in from of him. It's not idealism itself that is the problem, but that this 'idealism' was never about Iraqis. Idealism in this context amounts to heads of state, like Bush and Blair cooking up grand projects to bolster flagging authority at home . This was never really about Iraq, nor even clearly about ulterior economic interests. The disaster came about because they wanted to look good at home, and to appear to be spearheading some great transformation. As such, they were concerned more with how things looked domestically, than pursuing a consistent course of action in Iraq - hence the revolving door of officials (according to the review, the average stay is 90 days) and constantly shifting signposts. Not only is the anti-interventionist line not an atavistic 'isolationism', it is a demand that heads of state not avoid the problems facing those they claim to represent in the name of solving the problems of others. In this sense, the 'isolationists' are far more democratic than the democracy-exporters could ever hope to be.