Realistic Idealism--A Bush-Clinton Special
Is there a right way to support democracy in the Middle East? This seems to be a conundrum for Democrats and others opposed to Bush, but pro-democracy. Madeleine Albright undertook to answer the question in last week’s Washington Post. She urges that promoting democracy in the Middle East is not a mistake. Coining the phrase 'realistic idealism' she claims that while democracy is not a panacea for the region, not supporting reform is a betrayal of America’s duty to promote liberty.
Protecting idealism from the cynical claims of the realists forces Albright to treat Iraq as an exception:
The "realists" are right to bemoan the invasion of Iraq, but that misguided operation cannot be used to indict the promotion of democracy. The purpose of the invasion was to seize weapons that did not exist and to sever a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that had not been made. The failures were of leadership and intelligence, not a too-fervent commitment to democracy.
Iraq was wrong, because the justifications for the invasion were faulty—there never were any weapons of mass destruction, just as there never was any connection between the Iraqi regime and Bin Laden. By this reasoning, had Operation Iraqi Freedom really been intended to promote democracy, things might have been different. Apparently, for Albright, the purpose of American foreign policy governs its outcomes. This latter conclusion is affirmed by the fact that she suggests no alternatives to the course of action pursued by the Bush administration.
So were the outcomes different under Albright’s watch? It was the Albright state department that held fast and firm to the pre-invasion sanctions regime against Iraq. Albright is famously on the record as declaring that rising child mortality, for which sanctions were at least partly to blame, was “worth it.” Albright’s bluster in the face of international dissatisfaction with the sanctions regime was a precursor of the current administration’s battles with the UN over their 2003 invasion. Both administrations remained firm in the face of strong opposition, both utilized the reasoning that they could not back down in the face of such a righteous cause. As Albright herself suggests in the Washington Post, Iraq was not an obvious target for the Bush Administration’s efforts (given no weapons and no Qaeda connection). It seems likely that it was the miserable stalemate of the sanctions policy that first led Bush et al. to focus on Iraq as an arena for positive action in international affairs.
And why would Bush believe such a strategy was doomed to fail? Albright herself has received countless honorary degrees and high praise for her leadership and support for US interventionism. Although Albright provides no explanation in last week’s column for what the "right way to support democracy" would be, we may be able to surmise from her own interventionism under Clinton. The 1999 NATO campaign against Yugoslavia set a great precedent for Iraq—from the use of an ultimatum that the country either surrender sovereignty or be bombed into submission, to the institution of military action without UN approval. And the Yugoslavia action even matches Iraq in terms of its failure to meet any of its own goals.
This failure was recognized as early as September 1999, in as mainstream a publication as Foreign Affairs. Michael Mandelbaum described the NATO campaign in the September/October 1999 issue as:
“a conflict marked by military success and political failure. The alliance's air forces carried out their missions with dispatch; the assault forced the Serb military's withdrawal from the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The wider political consequences of the war, however, were the opposite of what NATO's political leaders intended…The war itself was the unintended consequence of a gross error in political judgment. Having begun it, Western political leaders declared that they were fighting for the sake of the people of the Balkans, who nevertheless emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before.”
The description could equally be applied to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mandelbaum continues: “The alliance also went to war, by its own account, to protect the precarious political stability of the countries of the Balkans. The result, however, was precisely the opposite: the war made all of them less stable. Albania was flooded with refugees with whom it had no means of coping. In Macedonia, the fragile political balance between Slavs and indigenous Albanians was threatened by the influx of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.” And if anyone wonders what our intervention in the Balkans did for democracy and self-determination, just take a look at the authoritarianism when Paddy Ashdown governed, or more recent developments in Kosovo.
Albright’s call for a realistic idealism is expressly aimed at the successors to the Bush Administration. Yet her defense of “idealism” (i.e.- democracy promotion) unwittingly seeks an extension of the destructive commonalities between the Clinton and Bush foreign policies. As we have said numerous times at AWOT, external intervention into the affairs of weaker states does nothing to support the democracy or liberty of their citizens. In fact, intervention by the West, with the US often at the helm, serves to distort local dynamics in ways we do not anticipate. The most powerful arbiters in determining the future of a state becomes external actors (the US, the EU, the UN, NATO), thus shifting the point of negotiation from a local, state-based one to the international stage—further undermining the ability of local citizens to effect change over their state. Suddenly, the route to power is through pandering to our interests, not local ones. Truly democratic institutions only arise through the collective efforts of those governed by them, not by imposition.
Albright concludes that at the top of the next administration’s “to-do” list “must be a reaffirmation of America's commitment to liberty and respect for the dignity of every human being. Without such a commitment, all else will be in vain.” What Albright, Clinton, Bush, and all current Democratic and Republican proposals miss is that such a commitment cannot be achieved through military adventurism abroad. It must arise from democratic activity at home.
Protecting idealism from the cynical claims of the realists forces Albright to treat Iraq as an exception:
The "realists" are right to bemoan the invasion of Iraq, but that misguided operation cannot be used to indict the promotion of democracy. The purpose of the invasion was to seize weapons that did not exist and to sever a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that had not been made. The failures were of leadership and intelligence, not a too-fervent commitment to democracy.
Iraq was wrong, because the justifications for the invasion were faulty—there never were any weapons of mass destruction, just as there never was any connection between the Iraqi regime and Bin Laden. By this reasoning, had Operation Iraqi Freedom really been intended to promote democracy, things might have been different. Apparently, for Albright, the purpose of American foreign policy governs its outcomes. This latter conclusion is affirmed by the fact that she suggests no alternatives to the course of action pursued by the Bush administration.
So were the outcomes different under Albright’s watch? It was the Albright state department that held fast and firm to the pre-invasion sanctions regime against Iraq. Albright is famously on the record as declaring that rising child mortality, for which sanctions were at least partly to blame, was “worth it.” Albright’s bluster in the face of international dissatisfaction with the sanctions regime was a precursor of the current administration’s battles with the UN over their 2003 invasion. Both administrations remained firm in the face of strong opposition, both utilized the reasoning that they could not back down in the face of such a righteous cause. As Albright herself suggests in the Washington Post, Iraq was not an obvious target for the Bush Administration’s efforts (given no weapons and no Qaeda connection). It seems likely that it was the miserable stalemate of the sanctions policy that first led Bush et al. to focus on Iraq as an arena for positive action in international affairs.
And why would Bush believe such a strategy was doomed to fail? Albright herself has received countless honorary degrees and high praise for her leadership and support for US interventionism. Although Albright provides no explanation in last week’s column for what the "right way to support democracy" would be, we may be able to surmise from her own interventionism under Clinton. The 1999 NATO campaign against Yugoslavia set a great precedent for Iraq—from the use of an ultimatum that the country either surrender sovereignty or be bombed into submission, to the institution of military action without UN approval. And the Yugoslavia action even matches Iraq in terms of its failure to meet any of its own goals.
This failure was recognized as early as September 1999, in as mainstream a publication as Foreign Affairs. Michael Mandelbaum described the NATO campaign in the September/October 1999 issue as:
“a conflict marked by military success and political failure. The alliance's air forces carried out their missions with dispatch; the assault forced the Serb military's withdrawal from the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo. The wider political consequences of the war, however, were the opposite of what NATO's political leaders intended…The war itself was the unintended consequence of a gross error in political judgment. Having begun it, Western political leaders declared that they were fighting for the sake of the people of the Balkans, who nevertheless emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before.”
The description could equally be applied to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mandelbaum continues: “The alliance also went to war, by its own account, to protect the precarious political stability of the countries of the Balkans. The result, however, was precisely the opposite: the war made all of them less stable. Albania was flooded with refugees with whom it had no means of coping. In Macedonia, the fragile political balance between Slavs and indigenous Albanians was threatened by the influx of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.” And if anyone wonders what our intervention in the Balkans did for democracy and self-determination, just take a look at the authoritarianism when Paddy Ashdown governed, or more recent developments in Kosovo.
Albright’s call for a realistic idealism is expressly aimed at the successors to the Bush Administration. Yet her defense of “idealism” (i.e.- democracy promotion) unwittingly seeks an extension of the destructive commonalities between the Clinton and Bush foreign policies. As we have said numerous times at AWOT, external intervention into the affairs of weaker states does nothing to support the democracy or liberty of their citizens. In fact, intervention by the West, with the US often at the helm, serves to distort local dynamics in ways we do not anticipate. The most powerful arbiters in determining the future of a state becomes external actors (the US, the EU, the UN, NATO), thus shifting the point of negotiation from a local, state-based one to the international stage—further undermining the ability of local citizens to effect change over their state. Suddenly, the route to power is through pandering to our interests, not local ones. Truly democratic institutions only arise through the collective efforts of those governed by them, not by imposition.
Albright concludes that at the top of the next administration’s “to-do” list “must be a reaffirmation of America's commitment to liberty and respect for the dignity of every human being. Without such a commitment, all else will be in vain.” What Albright, Clinton, Bush, and all current Democratic and Republican proposals miss is that such a commitment cannot be achieved through military adventurism abroad. It must arise from democratic activity at home.
3 Comments:
You really are impossible.
"Iraq was not an obvious target...It seems likely that it was the miserable stalemate of the sanctions policy that first led Bush et al. to focus on Iraq as an arena for positive action in international affairs."
Oh, yeah, that. And the oil.
As sympathetic as I am to the editors' principal theme, I do think the claim that the failure of the Kosovo intervention to bring that "country" democracy proves that theme is wrong.
We must remember that Milosevic had put himself into a box from which he could not, on his own, escape. His Serbian ultranationalism and "Field of Blackbirds" mythologizing in the face of his inability to induce Serbs to populate Kosovo and of the growth in power of the KLA meant that he was compelled to engage in a more or less barbarous "occupation" of Kosovo.
Western leaders, earlier embarrassed by doing nothing in respect of four years of ethnic cleansing in and around Bosnia, couldn't allow a repeat performance and maintain their amour propre.
But wouldn't ithave been better for everyone if Serbs got rid of Slobo themselves? Democracy has to be won by the people and not given by someone else.
As regards Iraq and oil...do you still cling on to the fantasy that it was 'all about oil'? It never was, of course...if you showed the war plans to an oil company they would not have been too impressed by it as a business plan...
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