Solomonia Archive: Free, Fear, Democracy

Sunday, October 23, 2005

TigerHawk has a lengthy and interesting post on the uses of democratization. Go take a look.

I have a couple of minor quibbles/additions (assuming I'm understanding correctly).

TigerHawk:

The true benefit of democratization has very little to do with Natan Sharansky's romantic view that a genuine franchise and the civil rights necessary to sustain it will somehow destroy jihadi terrorism by removing the discontent that feeds its roots. No, the best and perhaps only argument for democratization is that it will increase the number of active enemies of the jihadis within the Muslim world, whether or not those enemies of the Islamists are themselves supporters of the United States or quite opposed to us. It will be enough for us to create more enemies of al Qaeda. We need to create more enemies of al Qaeda because we cannot beat al Qaeda on our own.

I think he is shorting Sharansky here. Sharansky's ideas are not utopian, they are practical. That's the point of them, and the intended result is to do exactly what TigerHawk describes -- create enemies of extremism -- in fact, unleash the great middle to do exactly that. The idea is to change Fear societies into Free societies (which then necessarily become democratic). It's not just about democracy per se -- it's about Freedom. A Free society is one in which the moderate elements are able to oppose the radicals -- freedom and democracy create the ideological foot soldiers and the societal infrastructures necessary to do the internal combat TigerHawk describes. They change society from a dysfunctional one into one in which the masses of good people are unleashed -- where the marketplace of ideas is allowed to function and flourish. Witness, for instance, the difficulties the Ranting Sandmonkey had in organizing a simple candlelight vigil for a cause his regime supposedly supports! (Check in his archives about here.)

TigerHawk again:

Unfortunately, steps we take to coerce the autocracies of the Muslim world also make us less popular among the Muslim masses. This is not different from the Cold War, in which active American efforts to contain communism -- the Cuban embargo, the military defense of South Korea and Vietnam, support for the insurgents in Angola, support for Taiwan, and support for Israel in 1967 and 1973 -- enraged the otherwise oppressed populations of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and so forth. As we learned during the Cold War, containment alone cannot dispose of an enemy founded in a well-articulated political philosophy. We therefore must combine containment of the jihadis with a long-term plan to motivate the Muslim world to discredit and destroy the jihad from within. This is the true purpose and promise of the Bush Administration's "democratization" strategy, even if Bush himself does not express it this way or even understand it in these terms.

I think the opposite is actually often the case. It may seem this way superficially, because protests by the "Arab street" are easy and popular with the powers that be, look good on the news, and are often exploited by our internal isolationist political forces like the CIA and the paleo-con end of the political spectrum (and the press), but they never have amounted to much have they? In fact, if you look at the places where we are most at odds with the regime, we are often most popular with the populace. Iran being a perfect case in point. In fact, we are often most hated and criticized for our support of unpopular, repressive regimes. Some of the places we get along with the regime best, like Jordan and Egypt, we pull our worst popularity numbers. So much for making nice. In fact, those two places are breeding grounds of Jew-hate in spite of being officially at peace with Israel. Go figure.

The trouble is really in the short-term, where opposition to a ruling regime may result in less cooperation and even open opposition from the powers-that-be, and we may suffer long before the power of the people can be unleashed from below in the long term. So the problem is in surviving through to the long term (not losing basing, not turning the armed forces of the regime itself into an enemy), not so much in unpopularity with the masses.

One of the keys is that America still needs to remain strong and let it be known that our enemies will pay a prices for choosing that role. If a society that may be somewhat aligned against us ideologically should become democratic, we still need to hold to this policy. After all, if there is no price to be paid for opposition, even a democracy will continue to hate us. But once they become a democracy, once they are free, and the great middle is able to speak, odds are that they will say to themselves, "Is war with America what we really want? Let's just call them the Great Satan, but let us not provoke him. It's not worth it." And then they turn inward and clamp down on the extremists, the terrorists that risk that peace that they desire and are enabled to fight from within for. And once they practice that attitude with a peaceful, rational, goal for awhile, it may just become a habit.

Posted by Solomon at 5:14 PM on Sunday, Oct 23, 2005
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