Imposing Democracy

As I said before Fareed Zakaria is a very smart man but he does have blind spots. Everyone has blind spots but they are a lot more noticeable when they belong to a smart person. In the article “Losing the War, as Well as the Battle,” Zakaria makes an intelligent lament of the failure of democracy in the Middle East due to the U.S.’s failure in Iraq. His analysis is very convincing and refreshing, but he fails to acknowledge the fundamental fault of the Iraq War vis-à-vis democracy—democracy cannot be imposed. The idea was that the imperial power would come in with overwhelming firepower to overthrow the despot and install a model democracy that would spread throughout the Middle East and solve the myriads of conflict there all together. That is a fantasy worthy of the Baron Münchhausen himself. What the modern day Münchhausens failed to take into account is the most fundamental nature of democracy—democracy is what people want for themselves and not what is given to them. Not everybody wants democracy. Some rather have a monarch to take care of everything. Most just want democracy when it serves their interests, even in the most ‘democratic’ of societies. Even when they want democracy, they may want a brand of democracy different from whatever is offered. The Iranian democracy is very similar to what some fundamentalist Christian’s vision of an ‘American’ democracy. And to many communists, proletarian dictatorship is the most democratic system under the present condition. No one ever asked the Iraqis what kind of democracy they wanted, what kind of government they wanted, or even if they wanted any change at all. Similarly, no one asks what the different Middle Eastern populations what they want. The whole exercise itself is anti-democratic to the extreme—to impose a political system on a people through the use of extreme force. The failure of this Middle East democratizing project is not so much the failure of the war/post-war Iraq but the very idea itself.