INVASION VS. PERSUASION

COMMENTARY: by George Packer
The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker magazine
New York, NY, Issue of December 20, 2004
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041220ta_talk_packer

President Bush has put the idea of spreading democracy around the world at the rhetorical heart of American foreign policy. No one should doubt that he and his surviving senior advisers believe in what they call the “forward strategy of freedom,” even if they’ve had to talk themselves into it. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush himself are late-comers to the idea; in earlier incarnations, they sounded a lot more like Henry Kissinger than like Woodrow Wilson. By now, though, it’s clear that, however clumsy and selective the execution, Bush wants democratization to be his legacy.

So when his critics, here and abroad, claim that his rhetoric merely provides cynical cover for an American power grab, they misjudge his sincerity and tend to sound like defenders of the status quo. And when the Administration tries to wring every last sweet drop of partisan gain from its foreign policy (sincerity is not the same thing as honesty), critics are driven to conclude that “democracy” is just another word for “neoconservatism.”

This is not a good position for the opposition to be in, either morally or politically. The best role for critics in the President’s second term will be not to scoff at the idea of spreading freedom but to take it seriously—to hold him to his own talk. The hard question isn’t whether America should try to enlarge the democratic order but how. It’s a question that the Administration seems to have thought about very little, yet it makes a big difference. Look at the two examples from the week’s front pages: where the approach has been subtle and collective, the outcome seems hopeful; where it has been noisy and unilateralist, it does not.

The popular uprising in Ukraine has now secured a new Presidential election, the previous vote having been discredited by huge fraud. There’s a quiet American story behind that achievement. For years, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, governmental and non-governmental organizations poured millions of dollars into Ukraine’s politics, building up the parties, training civil-society groups and journalists, establishing election monitors. These efforts helped strengthen the opposition against a corrupt government, but they were nonpartisan: technical support was given to all parties.

The work in Ukraine built on earlier experiences in Serbia and Georgia, where groups like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute contributed, behind the scenes, to popular movements that eventually seized the moment to overthrow strongmen. Three peaceful democratic revolutions in ex-Communist countries in four years—a tremendous success, and few Americans even know that part of the credit belongs to this country.

Not surprisingly, the outgoing President of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, have complained about American meddling. So has an unlikely tandem in this country. “Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by Washington, which refuses to abandon its Cold War policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet Republic into its orbit,”The Nation claimed, once again taking the Russian side of the Cold War. And Pat Buchanan declared, “Congress should investigate N.E.D. and any organization that used clandestine cash or agents to fix the Ukrainian election, as the U.S. media appear to have gone into the tank for global democracy.”

But in Ukraine the meddlers have done nothing worse than help guarantee a people’s right to choose a government freely. The effort succeeded for two reasons: there was a democratic movement already in place; and outside support did not come with a “Made in America” label, because the Organization for Security and Co?peration in Europe also played an important part. “The thrust of the campaign is to oblige Ukraine to have a free and fair election,” Thomas Carothers, a democracy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says. “This is a human right. It’s not American. It’s not unilateralist.”

In other words, the United States did in Ukraine exactly what it failed to do in Iraq: it upheld international standards in conjunction with democratic allies. The consequences of this failure in Iraq will always haunt the American effort there. The war has grown so destructive that Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai was just inaugurated as the first democratically elected President, has become the Administration’s success story almost by default. But Karzai’s victory only ratified a political consensus that had been hammered out by anti-Taliban parties, under United Nations auspices, in Bonn in 2001, and had won immediate international recognition. In Iraq, the United States has tried to stage-manage the political transition alone, and has seen every plan overtaken and nullified by events.

Lacking legitimacy in the eyes of both Iraq and the rest of the world, defying international standards and declaring its own, the Administration has had to base its claim on good intentions. But in the war of perception between that claim and the daily stories of tortured prisoners and civilian deaths America is losing. According to Carothers, who has just co-edited the first technical book on democracy promotion in the Middle East, the Iraq model has set back the cause of Arab reformers.

At this point, the Administration seems ready to hold an election and declare victory. Meanwhile, the insurgency looks increasingly like a civil war. An election, though politically necessary, might only worsen the conflict. Shiite politicians and clerics are organizing a unified ballot that will guarantee the majority Shiites a vast share of next month’s election spoils at the expense of the country’s alienated Sunnis. The elected parliament, which will write a constitution, isn’t likely to be
truly representative, or to create a political consensus out of this violent
polarization.

More probably, the losers will opt out and the civil war will intensify. The alternative of delaying elections, advocated by some Sunni and Kurdish politicians and, privately, by some Administration officials, would only antagonize the leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the one indispensable man in Iraq today. Delay would also perpetuate the occupation. As always in Iraq, America is faced with bad choices.

Not every country is lucky enough to be Ukraine, where internal opposition and quiet outside help will likely succeed in replacing a bad regime. But the ordeal in Iraq has shown that a war of liberation is a crude instrument for setting a country free. Democracy is not the absence of tyranny. It has to grow from within over time, and it requires far more care and feeding than Washington seems able to give