Thoughtful and disturbing dissection by Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic of the growing mood of appeasement -- sorry, realism -- in Washington in the light of the US difficulties in Iraq. Kaplan points out that the turmoil has eclipsed the Pentagon strategists who drove the post-9/11 approach and has handed power back to the apologists for the old, failed realpolitik, for whom the aim of encouraging democracy in the Middle East is a dangerous chimera. But as Kaplan observes:

... today's problems in Iraq do not derive from failures of democracy. They derive from failures of security, which have made democracy difficult to achieve. Those failures owe to a well-chronicled fact--the United States lacks the troop levels required to provide security. It should be axiomatic that, as former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser and democracy expert Larry Diamond puts it, "you can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." In Iraq today, not even the U.S. Army, much less the interim government, possesses such a monopoly.'

This is indeed the problem and points to the fundamental failure by the US in its post-war policy, that it thought it could win the war and get out at speed because the liberated Iraqis by themselves would recreate the democratic structures and institutions of which they had been deprived for so long. An egregious error, for which the US has paid dearly. Unfortunately, the larger outcome has been to sap the will of the US -- and therefore the west -- to fight in the cause it correctly identified after 9/11. Particularly alarming is the likely re-appeasement of Iran:

'Gone from the administration's rhetoric is any talk of regime change in Tehran. Gone, too, in fact, is any mention of democracy there at all--apart, that is, from Armitage's insistence that Iran already qualifies as one. "The administration's realists are running Iran policy," says Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the National Defense University. "It's no longer regime change; it's détente." In Libya, as well, democracy has taken a backseat to the new realism. In exchange for Libya's renunciation of its WMD arsenal, Secretary of State Colin Powell now hails the brutal dictatorship as "an example to other nations"--this, despite his own State Department's assessment that Libya still employs "widespread use of torture and other degrading treatment [and] restricts freedoms of speech, assembly, press and expression." For his part, Bush has gone so far as to praise two autocrats, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, for their willingness to "recognize the importance of representative, democratic institutions." Demonstrating that "recognition," both boycotted this week's unveiling of Bush's initiative for democracy in the Arab world.'

The errors made by the US in Iraq have been amplified by a more fundamental problem. The American elite is divided between two polarised world views. On the one hand there is the belief -- associated with the Pentagon -- that the old realpolitik paid Danegeld for decades to appease an ideology which has turned into a monster that must now at all costs be destroyed before it destroys the west. The best way to do this is to actively encourage its sponsoring regimes towards democracy and away from the tyranny and despotism that breeds it. The opposing view, associated with the State Department, says it is arrogant and deluded to imagine that these states can become democratic, and that the west cannot defeat the ideology behind the terror. The best course is therefore to eschew war and rely instead on supra-national agencies to arbitrate and negotiate and thus keep the merchants of terror locked in a box.

But it is precisely that approach which resulted in 9/11. For the problem with the 'international community' and the supra-national institutions it sponsors is that it is dominated by those very rogue states and terror regimes it supposedly polices.

And the real difficulty that has consumed America is that President Bush has not been the leader that the situation requires. He's talked the talk all right, but he has not walked the walk. This may seem perverse -- even comical -- considering that he did go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and is reviled therefore as a warmonger the length and breadth of appeaseland. And I certainly don't want to detract from the courage of those decisions, nor the many fine speeches he has made which have correctly identified the challenge and articulated a determination to rise to it.

But the brutal fact remains that President Bush has failed to come down decisively on one side or the other in the great battle that has raged through his administration since 9/11 between the Pentagon and State. He seems to have listened first to one side, then to the other, with the result that policy on the ground has swung dizzily between the two poles and chaos has been the result. This has been exacerbated by the bad judgments made at the start, when the US so badly misunderstood the nature of the task to be done in securing the peace in Iraq. The violence that followed, the recriminations from all sides and the rising panic at the unconscionable prospect of failure, appear to have made it even more difficult for the President to chart a decisive course between the warring factions in Washington, which wags have dubbed more violent than the Sunni triangle.

The dismaying outcome is that, even if Iraq turns out well, it is hard to see that a badly scarred America is going to hold its nerve and do what it said it would in the Middle East. And an America licking its wounds and beating a retreat would mean, quite simply, that the defence of the west would be lost. Iran is surely the next acid test -- and the signs are not auspicious.

Posted by melanie at June 15, 2004