Soccer Dad: The benefits of reduced expectations

March 2, 2006

The benefits of reduced expectations

There's an old joke:

Q)How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
A)One, but the light bulb really has to want to change.

Alternatively it's important to note this famous exchange with Benjamin Franklin.

�Well, Doctor, what have we got�a Republic or a Monarchy?�
�A Republic, if you can keep it.�

A state or country is not something that just happens. There must be a political will of a given people to have that state in order for it to be successful. Two recent articles have argued that states - specifically democratic states - are not a naturally occurring phenomenon and to promote them without the will of the governed (or perhaps more correctly of those to be governed) is skipping a necessary, but not necessarily neat, step in the process.

Daniel Pipes in Civil War in Iraq? disagrees with President Bush's critics that the war will be a failure if the United States fails to put a democracy in place before it leaves

When Washington and its allies toppled the hideous regime of Saddam Hussein, which endangered the outside world by beginning two wars of expansion, by building a WMD arsenal, and by aspiring to control the trade in oil and gas, they bestowed a historic benefit on Iraqis, a population that had been wantonly oppressed by the Stalinist dictator.

Unsurprisingly, his regime quickly fell to outside attack, proving to be the "cakewalk" that many analysts, including myself, had expected. That six-week victory remains a glory of American foreign policy and of the coalition forces. It also represents a personal achievement for President Bush, who made the key decisions.

Had America not done anything else, that would have been a huge achievement by itself according to Pipes.

But the president decided that this mission was not enough. Dazzled by the examples of post-World War II Germany and Japan � whose transformations in retrospect increasingly appear to have been one-time achievements � he committed troops in the pursuit of creating a "free and democratic Iraq." This noble aim was inspired by the best of America's idealism.

But nobility of purpose did not suffice for rehabilitating Iraq, as I predicted already in April 2003. Iraqis, a predominantly Muslim population newly liberated from their totalitarian dungeon, were disinclined to follow the American example; for their part, the American people lacked a deep interest in the welfare of Iraq. This combination of forces guarantees the coalition cannot impose its will on 26 million Iraqis.

So according to Dr. Pipes it is quite possible that the goal of a free and democratic Iraq is not an option for the foreseeable future and that the world should be content with a stable interim option in the meantime.

Similarly Ambassador Zalman Shoval considers Is Palestinian Statehood Still a Valid Option? (Discussed here too.)

Abassador Shoval considers a number of rationales for a Palestinian state, and rejects each one.

...it is claimed that giving the Palestinians a state is really an Israeli interest, or as Henry Kissinger put it in a recent article: "an Israeli strategic requirement." But it isn't and never was. At best, Palestinian statehood can be seen as perhaps an inevitable development, faute de mieux, under present circumstances.
...
In other words, unless the problem will be solved the way other refugee problems have been solved around the world, namely, by permanently settling and integrating them in the Arab countries of which they have been part, albeit mostly without basic rights, for almost 60 years, the Arab refugee issue will continue to be a ticking time-bomb endangering the stability of the whole Middle East.

So Ambassador Shoval concludes

In a recent address at the Jerusalem Center, Prof. Shlomo Avineri made the point that there are many conflicts in the world that the international community is uncertain how to solve: Kosovo, Bosnia, and Cyprus are recent examples that he raises. So why should the entire international community be so certain that Palestinian statehood is the inevitable outcome of any Arab-Israeli peace process, especially if it is a far more difficult conflict to resolve than any of the European conflicts named above?

Prior to the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, the Palestinian interest in negotiations was represented by a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference and subsequent bilateral talks in Washington. Whether Jordan might be interested in resuming federal links with the Palestinians after the failure of their self-governing exercise remains to be seen. But with the rise of Hamas, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state should no longer be taken for granted. Alternative solutions must be considered, given the magnitude of the Palestinian failure to live up to the Oslo Accords, the "Roadmap for Peace," and Bush's 2002 statements.

A free and democratic Iraq. A free and democratic Palestine. Both have been touted as solutions to instability and violence. But, perhaps, by pushing for democracy as solution rather than a process, the Bush administration is setting up Iraq and "Palestine" for failure. As Arlene Kushner writes

But free elections are not, in and of themselves, a major signpost of a democracy. Such elections are properly the culmination of a long process in which democracy has been established in a society � a society that genuinely fosters concepts of human dignity and freedoms. After the elections, Sharansky spoke out once more with regard to the situation. "Democracy isn't hocus-pocus; it's a process," he said in a Jerusalem Post interview. "An election between a terrorist organization that wants to destroy the state of Israel and a corrupt dictatorship that does not care about helping its own people is not democracy. The results of the election were clean but it has nothing to do with democracy."

Or as Natan Sharansky, himself, wrote

Rather than seriously link the peace process to the building of a free society among the Palestinians, the democratic world, including Israel, turned a blind eye as Palestinian civil society was hollowed out, its streets taken over by armed thugs and its youth indoctrinated to glorify suicide bombers and despise Israel and America, Jews and Christians.

The international community repeated its shallow formula for peace like a broken record. International legitimacy, Israeli concessions and billions of dollars in aid were used to strengthen Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority - the "moderates" who had ostensibly renounced violence and accepted Israel's existence - and marginalize extremist groups like Hamas.

Technorati tags: democracy, freedom, Iraq, Palestinian Authority.