In Iraq's success, Bush's vindication
'None of the American mistakes invalidate the war - any more than the Dresden bombings invalidated the fight against Hitler'
For the past two years, I have taught a course on the Iraq war -- first at the graduate level at The New School university in New York, and now at the undergraduate level at my new home at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. We spend a lot of time on the background to the war before moving onto its consequences. At a certain point, I pop the question: Is democracy a failure in Iraq? Students usually eye me suspiciously before offering up a series of conditionals: If so and so happens then failure is more or less likely, while so and so suggests the possibility of success.
In a world of instant opinions and impatient journalistic commentary, discussions of democratic development in Iraq -- and with it, the judgment of the war itself -- have become well-nigh impossible. In the classroom, however, it is possible to take the long view. And while my students are usually skeptical about the prospects of success, my own view is more positive: Iraqi democracy is on the right track. As it continues to develop in the decades to come, George W. Bush's war will be vindicated.
Let me explain with reference to two key considerations: legacies and time-horizons.
It is no secret that Iraq labours under several legacies -- a history of imperial mis-design, an economy and a political culture devastated by the consequences of Saddam Hussein's regime, ethnic divides, the oil curse and a wholly undemocratic regional setting -- all of which makes democracy-building a tall order.
Yet Iraq is rising to the challenge. The only semi-democratic states in the Arab world are Jordan and Kuwait. Iraq is rapidly surpassing them in terms of its electoral, civil and media freedoms.
Democracies with income levels similar to Iraq include the Philippines, Indonesia and Nicaragua. They represent the proper standard of comparison for the quality of democracy in Iraq. And by that standard, the country is doing fairly well. Iraq's legislature is, albeit slowly, making real progress. Laws governing oil revenues, the re-integration of ex-Baathists and the country's first national budget are either already agreed upon or close to it. The rights of provincial governors are to be clarified by another new law.
Meanwhile, the government is sharing out oil revenues, hiring ex-Baathists and spending on capital construction through consensus arrangements. Through it all, the give-and-take of coalitional politics is emerging.
As for time horizons, the government elected in 2005 has served only two years in office. We usually give our politicians at least a four-to five-year term in order to engineer even minor changes in public policy. Why would we expect Iraq to build a functioning democracy in terrible conditions in a shorter time? Talk about double standards.
"Sure," you might say, "the Iraqis may yet establish a decent democracy of some sort. But why would this vindicate the war itself ? Wasn't the Bush administration deceitful in its use of weapons-of-mass-destruction as a pretext for launching the invasion? And didn't the absence of a UN Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing war make it an illegal act?"
Yes, on both counts, but that does not undermine the justification of the war.
While American citizens are rightly angered by the Bush administration's
mendacity on WMD, the failure of democratic checks and balances prior to the war, and the war's mounting costs (which will make every American about $10,000 poorer according to economist Joseph Stiglitz), as an outsider my concern was simply the elimination of a rogue regime and the provision of better life prospects for its citizens. On this count, there was a robust humanitarian justification for the war against Saddam's Iraq.
Of course, the war had to meet certain conditions.
First, the war had to be fought justly. Lots of mistakes have been made in fighting this war -- the early emphasis on "force protection" that resulted in needlessly high civilian casualty rates, for instance, and the travesty of dozens of prisoners being mistreated at Abu Ghraib (the prison where Saddam's regime tortured and executed an estimated 7,000 dissidents between 1984 and 1999). But none of these mistakes are serious enough to invalidate the war as a whole, any more than the Dresden bombings invalidated the fight against Hitler.
Secondly, the war had to do on balance more good than harm -- the so-called "proportionality" condition. The more than 100,000 Iraqi deaths since the war's onset -- roughly 0.4% of the population -- has been a horrible price to pay for removing Saddam from power. This figure, however, must be compared with the number of lives that would eventually be lost when Saddam's unpopular and sadistic regime fell by indigenous hands -- say, by a Shia-led assassination or an internal Baath-party coup.
Virtually every analysis of such a scenario predicts a bloody mess that would make the chaos that actually unfolded in post-invasion Iraq look like a petty squabble by comparison. When Idi Amin's similarly loathed regime in Uganda fell to an internal rebel insurgency in 1979, 200,000 lives -- 1.6% of the population -- were lost before order was restored in 1986. Yugoslavia's wars of succession had already claimed just over 1% of the local population be-fore NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo (neither endorsed by the UN) ended the killings there. By any measure, the "proportionality" condition has been met in Iraq.
Finally, there had to be a reasonable probability of success. This is where the establishment of a democratic government comes in.
The developments described above are vindicating, not undermining, the original case for war. The U.S. Congress is right to set demanding benchmarks for the Iraqi parliament as part of plans for a drawdown of U.S. forces as early as 2009. But this bureaucratic imperative is no substitute for objective analysis. Iraq's democracy may be failing some congressional benchmarks, but it is succeeding beyond appropriate expectations that account for Iraq's cruel legacies, its income level, and its short lifespan.
I'm no fan of Bush. But I am a fan of the Iraq war. As Iraq's democracy emerges -- the next parliamentary elections are due in late 2009 -- my appreciation of the tragic need for this war will continue to grow.
gilleyb@queensu.ca
-Bruce Gilley is an assistant professor of political studies at Queen's University.
In Iraq's success, Bush's vindication
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