IRAQ - Ever A Functioning Democracy?

Jan/22/07

For two years we have expected republicanism to gain traction in the Mid East.
From a posting from this center of Feb/27/05: Realists have maintained that the Mid East is the least hospitable place in the world for a democracy. They are mistaken. What is true is that for the past 45 years a civilization gap has continued to widen between this region and so many other parts of the world. Arab countries have aped western ideas but sought to implement these through state power - capitalist dictatorships that don’t work. The inevitable decay and failure, the brutality of rule have together bred a growing yet sub-surface counterculture of resistance. It is this reservoir of internal pressure and agitation, before constrained or crushed by ruling thugs that now will be married to an enlightened US agenda, ultimately transforming the entire region.

Were we wrong? No. Expecting too much too early from our newborn? Yes.

American patriots too worried after independence that the building blocks might not actually exist. Some lost hope. "We are not," said Charles Lee in 1777, "materials for such divine manufacture."

The war, Robert Livingston told Gouverneur Morris in 1779, had not produced the effect "expected from it upon the manners of the people." There was disappointment that the people, having been given a considerable amount of power by the new state constitutions (most written in 1776) were not qualified to handle it; corruption, vice, licentiousness, uprisings - all seemed common, and everywhere. Benjamin Franklin noted that, "We have been guarding against one evil - the excess of power in the rulers but our present danger seems to be the defect of obedience in the subjects."

The people it seemed were not self sacrificing, the spirit of compromise seemed nowhere to be found. Jeremy Belknap writing in 1784 could say that although America had seemed the fittest place in the world for a republican experiment, the child now seemed to be going the way of the parent, "dissipated and corrupted even as it got on its feet." William Livingston, reflecting the general disappointment in early 1787, concluded that, "Americans do not exhibit the virtue that is necessary to support a republican government."

But of course we know from hindsight that in 1787 there was indeed reason for hope; in fact what Carol Berkin called in "A Brilliant Solution" was soon to take life. Some contemporaries saw that too. Benjamin Rush admonished those who had lost faith. It was absurd he said for Americans to "cry out, after the experience of three of four years, that we are not proper materials for republican government. Remember, we assumed these forms of government in a hurry, before we were prepared for them." Finally, he concluded that, "it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted." "Let us have patience. Our republican forms of government will in time beget republican opinions and manners. All will end well."

And so it did. Re Iraq - And so it will.

Robert Craven