Bombs Don’t Work

For the past seven years we’ve been playing a furious game of Whack-a-Mole with radical Islam. Even by conventional terms – tonnage of weapons dropped, etc. – this has been a major war.

What lies in the future may depend on who gets elected in the US in November. One guy looks pretty keen on keeping these wars ticking over and maybe adding one, perhaps even two, while stirring the embers of another Cold War to boot. The other guy – who knows? He doesn’t appear as bellicose but there are no guarantees.

We’re at the threshold of an era of multi-dimensional, global change. We’ve launched a massive expansion of Eastern economies, particularly the giant states of China and India.

There are a lot of problems looming that will eclipse Islamic fundamentalism. There’s anthropogenic global warming and all the associated climate change issues – droughts, floods, storms; species extinctions and migrations (ours too); desertification; freshwater exhaustion; land, air and water pollution; the spread of insects and diseases. Then in an increasingly busy world we’re going to have to tackle frictions over resources caused by the exhaustion of renewables and depletion of non-renewables. Add to that all the related problems associated with overpopulation and we’ve got a heaping plateful of existential challenges even without looking for wars to wage.

I don’t think we can afford wars any longer, at least not like we used to in the 20th Century. They suck up too many resources and deplete the energies we need to deal with everything else that’s knocking on our door at the moment. They’re an unacceptable distraction.

Take Islamist terrorism, for example. That’s “Islamist” as in radical Islam as in Wahabism. As the Muslim world goes, the Islamist movement is relatively small but we’ve done an awfully poor job at combating it.

Muslim kids go in the front door of these Madrassas and out the back door all fired up and ready for the Islamist training camps. Our approach has been to bomb’em into extinction once they’ve gone through this process. However to succeed in our approach, we have to wipe them out faster than they can come through the religious indoctrination level and we’re not even coming close on that score.

If the Islamist movement has a fundamental vulnerability it lies in its inability to sustain itself. It needs money and the active support of sympathizers, most of whom are not Islamists. We need to sort out what drives ordinary, rank and file Muslims, the “Arab Street,” to support these extremists.

I think there’s no end of reasons for the ongoing support of this extremism. A very powerful one is historical. The West has been powerfully meddling in Arab affairs for more than a century – shaping the place to suit our interests with little regard for theirs. We bundled together places like Pakistan and Iraq and Syria out of the spoils we picked up from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WWI. We even parcelled the Kurds out among at least six nations, sort of like sending the orphan kids off to live with various, distant relatives. In the process, we have persistently lied to and betrayed these people. We have persistently manipulated them to suit our purposes.

We’ve been astonishingly racist toward Arabs. We’ve treated them as though because they’re Arabs or Muslims or something they don’t need or aspire to the same things we insist upon – little things like human rights and democracy. Think I’m kidding? Look at the state of human rights and democratic movements in the West’s two closest Arab states – Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Do you think it’s just oversight that we constantly focus on the anti-democratic repression in Muslim states we don’t like – places like Iran and Syria – but seem not to mind when the oppressors are on our side?

Do you think the Arab people don’t see this? Do you think they don’t see that we support the status-quo that keeps them down, just so long as the tyrants are our pals?

We’ve contributed to a state of affairs in which radical Islam is the only vehicle of change remaining to so many of these Arab peoples. Okay, so we’ve done our bit to narrow their options down to one. Why are we surprised when they’re drawn to it?

The Islamists – whether you call them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or any of the lesser groups – get a lot of their support because they stand defiant of the very order that oppresses these people. It’s more a “my enemy’s enemy” sort of thing than a genuine alliance of immersed interests. They know the Islamists aren’t working for democratic change but they’re also the only bunch that’s taking a swing at their common foes.

For a while we gave the Arab Street reason to believe we were coming to spread democracy through their region. Now that’s something we’ve promised them before and they’re painfully aware of our past betrayals but when they did get a chance to exercise democracy we rushed right in to shut it down.

The Palestinians elected Hamas because they saw Fatah as atrophied, hopelessly corrupt and willing to sell them out to Israel and the US. They saw in Hamas their only real hope for change. And how did we react? We pretended like they didn’t vote, as though they didn’t choose. We acted as though Fatah had won. We even channeled money and arms to Fatah to stage a coup to oust Hamas.

Lebanese elections ended with Hezbollah winning a number of seats. We were outraged, it was unacceptable!

But wait a minute. Weren’t many of Israel’s early leaders key figures in its own, nationalist terrorist movements? Some of them were butchers, real murderers. Did that stop us from dealing with them? No, of course not. Now you may not have that little inconsistency in the forefront of your mind but you can bet the farm that it’s always in the minds of the Arab Street.

We Westerners celebrate all the struggles our ancestors went through to create the democracies we supposedly cherish today. Why do we find those same aspirations so outrageous when they involve the Arab peoples? One reason is because we’ve been groomed to be blind to it. We’re told, again and again, that all the Muslim people want to do is conquer the world – our world, that is – for Islam, for the Prophet. We’re told they’re on a suicide mission from their God to wipe us out because they can’t stand our Western societies, our freedom, our very democracies. Okay, anyone believing that, line up on the right under the sign that reads “Morons.”

Those arguments deny these people their essential humanity. This thinking presents Arabs as less than human. No, no, they don’t want to raise families, send their kids to school, have a few nice things and live in peace. No, Johnny, only human beings want those things, not Arabs. Sure some of them live in concentration – er, “refugee” camps, but that’s because they’re okay with it.

If there is a Christian God, what must he think of his adherents who act this way?

But I digress. If we want to get Arab terrorism under control, we have to repair the Arab Street. We have to accept that the only real leadership they have – at the moment – is in the radical movement, just as the Israeli leadership was birthed.

Then, and here’s the hard part, we have to believe in democracy and place our faith in its power. Yes, Arab peoples may begin electing outfits like Hamas and Hezbollah and, yes, the early years of their democratic experiment are apt to be uneven, at times even turbulent, but we have to believe that democracy will defeat extremism because it removes the common bond between Islamist extremists and the Arab Street without which the fundamentalists wither and die.

It’s time to do some major arm twisting in Cairo and Riyadh. It’s time we threw our support behind democracy movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia – economic and political support. If we can make change happen there, we really have the basis of spreading reform through the rest of the Middle East – by example, not by gunfire.

Or let’s just keep doing what’s worked out so wonderfully for us these past seven years. Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran.

 

Mending the Broken Harness of Democracy

Trust the New York Times’ David Brooks to put a highly spun gloss on a clearly stated problem. This time the columnist weighs in on the undoing of the cohesion that once marked the major democracies:

“…Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

…the Doha failure comes amid a decade of globosclerosis. The world has failed to effectively end genocide in Darfur. Chinese and Russian vetoes foiled efforts to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe. The world has failed to implement effective measures to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The world has failed to embrace a collective approach to global warming. Europe’s drive toward political union has stalled.

In each case, the logic is the same. Groups with a strong narrow interest are able to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and the small defeat the large.

Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win elections.

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.

And so the globosclerosis continues, and people around the world lose faith in their leaders. It’s worth remembering that George W. Bush is actually more popular than many of his peers. His approval ratings hover around 29 percent. Gordon Brown’s are about 17 percent. Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda’s are about 26 percent. Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi have ratings that are a bit higher, but still pathetically low.

This is happening because voters rightly sense that leaders lack the authority to address problems.

So, what would Mr. Brooks have us do? He endorses a League of Democracies, an idea conceived by several Democrats and embraced by John McCain. Like-minded nations unite to use their collective will to shape world events. What Brooks won’t say is that he sees his nation, the United States, as entitled to the mantle of “world leader” it formerly enjoyed.

Washington, having made a horrible mess of its experiment in unipolar world dominance, now wants to invite its old friends to sign on to something resembling one side of the old Cold War. Let bygones be bygones. Return to the default mode. Brooks hit the nail on the head when he wrote:

“There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.”

Brooks is inadvertently describing his own nation. America has persistently rejected multilateralism, particularly through institutions such as the UN and the International Court of Justice, and has held itself above all others, including its traditional allies.

Before there can be any genuine, effective League of Democracies, America is going to have to step down from that undeserved, unearned perch. Washington is going to have to acknowledge that the order, even among democracies, has been permanently altered – that the economy of the European Union is far greater than its own and that the role of consensus is now greater than ever. If Washington chooses to lead, it can only do that with the consent of the others and it is going to have to earn that consent. A key to that is to regain the trust of the fellow democracies it treated with such disdain for the past eight years.

In other words, if Washington does want a new, meaningful and effective alliance with like-minded states, it has an awful lot of work to do to rebuild the essential foundations. If it continues to treat its political, diplomatic and international deficits as irrelevant, it will only perpetuate the disharmony that Brooks complains of.

 

Don’t Get Smug, We’re Really Not That Much Better

A few observations from Bill Moyers taken from his new book, “Moyers on Democracy”:

“Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country – a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments – genuine savings – in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good” embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege – the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs – is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served.“

 

Oh Damn! Democracy’s Back in Pakistan

When it comes to the Global War Without End on Terror, the less democracy we have to overcome the better.

Look what happens when those brown people get democracy? You get Hamas elected by the Palestinians. Hezbollah gets in to the Lebanese legislature. Now you’ve got moderates in power in Pakistan. What next?

You see the thing is, once they get elected, they get all uppity. They just don’t do what they’re told, they’re hardly any use at all – or worse.

Take Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s former dictator. He swept the decks; threw uncooperative judges in jail, tossed the parliament – now there was a guy you could double-deal with. Sure he conned you a lot of the time but at least he said he’d do what he was told. And then, along comes democracy. Great.

Now Pakistan has fallen into the hands of a bunch of “free thinkers” who’ve announced they’ll actually hold talks with the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership in their country. When Bush sent diplomats John Negroponte and Richard Boucher to meet coalition leader Nawaz Sharif, they got a chilly welcome and a scolding. From The Guardian:

“…senior coalition partner Nawaz Sharif gave the visiting Americans a public scolding for using Pakistan as a “killing field” and relying too much on Musharraf.

“…body language between Negroponte and Sharif during their meeting on Tuesday spoke volumes: the Pakistani greeted the American with a starched handshake, and sat at a distance .

In blunt remarks afterwards, Sharif said he told Negroponte that Pakistan was no longer a one-man show. “Since 9/11, all decisions were taken by one man,” he said. “Now we have a sovereign parliament and everything will be debated in the parliament.”

It was “unacceptable that while giving peace to the world we make our own country a killing field,” Sharif said, echoing widespread public anger at US-funded military operations in the tribal belt.

“If America wants to see itself clean of terrorism, we also want our villages and towns not to be bombed,” he said.”

Well, there goes the neighbourhood and it’s all the fault of that damned democracy again.

 

Uncle Joe Harper’s Political Commisars

“In all dictatorships, targeting the free press begins with political pressure – loud, angry campaigns for the news to be represented in a way that supports the group that seeks dominance.” – Naomi Wolf, “The End of America.”

Now, relax, I’m not claiming that Harper intends to seize dictatorial power in Canada. I think it’s only a matter of time before that chump runs his course and the stain of his administration fades. That said, we do need to be mindful of this guy’s autocratic bent. Part of that lies in Harper’s manipulation of the Canadian media.

It came out late last year that Harpo had imposed a political filter on the Department of National Defence where requests for interviews or the release of information to the media had to be pre-cleared with senior bureaucrats in the PMO, the Prime Minister’s Office. These political commisars were obviously intended to control the message on the Afghanistan controversy. It’s a form of media manipulation and it’s a technique that Harper has shown he’ll use with other controversial issues.

The Vancouver Sun, a full-fledged KanWest paper, says the same tactics are being used by Harpo against Environment Canada.

“Environment Canada’s muzzling of its scientists might be shocking, but it’s hardly surprising.

The new policy, which apparently went into force in recent weeks, is designed to control the media message and ensure that Environment Minister John Baird faces no “surprises” when he reads or listens to the news.

The policy dictates that researchers refer all media queries to Ottawa. The media office then directs reporters to submit their questions in writing, and then researchers are to send written responses to senior management for approval. If the researcher is cleared to do an interview, he or she is asked to stick to “approved lines,” though it’s not clear what that enigmatic phrase means.

Needless to say, the new policy has infuriated scientists and sent a chill through Environment Canada. After all, while Gregory Jack, acting director of Environment Canada’s ministerial and executive services, insisted “there is no change in the access in terms of scientists being able to talk,” it’s clear that scientists are being severely hobbled in their ability to speak freely.

This is in stark contrast to Environment Canada’s treatment under previous governments, when it was one of the most open and accessible federal departments. That openness and accessibility, however, is seen by Environment Canada’s executive committee as a problem that needs to be remedied.

It appears that the Conservatives refuse to recognize any distinction between policy based on science and science itself. Rather than using scientific evidence to inform policy, the Conservatives seem more interested in ensuring that the science conforms to their policy.”

Once again we see the true face of Stephen Harper and it’s pretty ugly.

 

Stability, Then Democracy – Eventually, Maybe, Perhaps

Is Pakistan in any condition to attempt the leap into the uncertain arms of democracy? Despite the assassination of the one person most capable of attempting to bring her volatile country in that direction, the Musharraf government continues to be pressured to hold national elections scheduled in less than two weeks.

Why?

Pakistan’s military will not tolerate weak and ineffective civilian rule which is about all that is possible in the country’s current state of disarray. What can be gained from putting Pakistan through a repeat of the Zia and Musharraf coups?

Even Bhutto’s own PPP party was so fragile that, without her, there is no obvious leader to take her place. It was a one-woman band. That leaves her former rival, Sharif, who has already declared his party will boycott the elections. That seems to leave the way clear for Musharraf’s bunch to win and what conceivable credibility will invest them in these circumstances?

Even without the existential challenges from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and other, homegrown Jihadist and Islamist groups, civilian rule for Pakistan is a dubious prospect. One major reason is the pervasive influence of the Pakistani military, not only in the nation’s politics but in its economy.

Not only does the military have huge sums invested in businesses and real estate, but less active military officers commonly work in the economic sector. Retired members of the military have many business advantages, especially when competing for government contracts.

The Pakistani military is also able to acquire private land and redistribute it for its own personnel, where military-owned construction and transportation companies monopolize service through preferential awarding of government grants.

In Pakistan there are over 90 military foundations providing a wide variety of goods and services. There are also undocumented ventures such as bakeries and gas stations, which are set up in communities where they are able to undercut local prices.

Additionally, the actual military possesses financial autonomy and capacity to redistribute resources. The Pakistani military possesses considerable financial autonomy and is able to use the principle of eminent domain-generally used in America during the creation of highways, or public buildings-to acquire public land and redistribute it to their personnel.

Currently, the Pakistani military receives 10 percent of newly available land. The military received three million acres in 11 provinces in the last few years – just over 3.5 billion American dollars worth of property. As a result, there is less land for peasants to farm.

Military officials in Pakistan will aggressively defend these types of actions, saying that their business ventures are more effective and successful than private ones, and that that they are trying to raise money to better care for their soldiers.

Establishing legitimate democracy in Pakistan will require wholesale reform of the country’s military, prying away its economic clout. Until then the most that can be achieved at the ballot box is the creation of a weaker and ultimately secondary, civilian administration. A civilian government that rules only at the sufferance of an autonomous military is pretty much doomed from the start.

 

Is Bush Just Reagan Without Restraints?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes the case that George W. Bush is little more than a reiteration of Ronald Reagan. He notes that Reagan could have been like Bush if he’d had the same advantages – control of both houses of Congress, no pesky rival superpower, and an event like 9/11 that traumatized the nation and allowed an enormouse power grab.

I sometimes think that the shroud of nationalistic myth has done more for Reagan than it ever did for George Washington. Americans positively revere Reagan and that takes a willingness to ignore an awful lot of his true record.

For a notional conservative, Reagan transformed the US in just two terms from what had been the world’s largest creditor nation into the world’s largest debtor nation. He genuinely served the rich and powerful at the direct expense of the middle and lower classes. It was Reagan who drew the line between America’s “haves” and “have nots”. He violated his nation’s laws, trashed its constitution and supported terrorism in Central America, South America and Africa. Reagan’s hands were sopping with innocent blood by the time he left office. That this man should be revered rather than despised is quite phenomenal.

The Reagan miracle was that he knew what sold. He made America appear powerful again and, to its people, he restored their self-image as dominant and tough. With that parlour trick, Reagan was able to get a blank cheque for policy.

To draw comparisons, Krugman cites a 1993 article in The American Prospect by Johathan Cohn in which the author, “…described how the Interior Department had been packed with opponents of environmental protection, who ‘presided over a massive sell-off of federal lands to industry and developers’ that ‘deprived the department of several billion dollars in annual revenue.’ Oil leases, anyone?

“Meanwhile, privatization had run amok, because ‘the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.’ Holy Halliburton!

“Not mentioned in Mr. Cohn’s article, but equally reminiscent of current events, was the state of the Justice Department under Ed Meese, a man who gives Alberto Gonzales and John Mitchell serious competition for the title of worst attorney general ever. The politicization of Justice got so bad that in 1988 six senior officials, all Republicans, including the deputy attorney general and the chief of the criminal division, resigned in protest.

“Why is there such a strong family resemblance between the Reagan years and recent events? Mr. Reagan’s administration, like Mr. Bush’s, was run by movement conservatives — people who built their careers by serving the alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. And both cronyism and abuse of power are part of the movement conservative package.

“In part this is because people whose ideology says that government is always the problem, never the solution, see no point in governing well. So they use political power to reward their friends, rather than find people who will actually do their jobs.

“If expertise is irrelevant, who gets the jobs? No problem: the interlocking, lavishly financed institutions of movement conservatism, which range from K Street to Fox News, create a vast class of apparatchiks who can be counted on to be ‘loyal Bushies.’

“The movement’s apparatchik culture, in turn, explains much of its contempt for the rule of law. Someone who has risen through the ranks of a movement that prizes political loyalty above all isn’t likely to balk at, say, using bogus claims of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democrats, or suppressing potentially damaging investigations of Republicans. As Franklin Foer of The New Republic has pointed out, in College Republican elections, dirty tricks and double crosses are considered acceptable, even praiseworthy.”

Krugman shows that modern conservatism is indeed “movement conservatism” a far-right wing ideology stripped of any progressive tendencies. It is a movement that advances by dividing, by exploiting wedge issues. It confounds and deceives the center so that it can serve its real constituents on the far right. It strives not for democracy but for oligarchy.

 

Whither Democracy?

I am no political scientist and don’t pretend to be one. What I know I’ve gleaned from my reporting days and, since then, from what I’ve read and observed. That said, I knew plenty to realize from the outset that Washington’s grandiose plan to bring democracy to Iraq and, from there, to the Middle East was doomed to failure.

Americans have a vision of themselves as exceptional, unique and, frankly, superior. They believe their form of democracy to be the ideal and, if you fervently believed that, how could you not want to share that with other, less fortunate nations?

The approach is both simplistic and naive. Look around the world today and you’ll quickly see that democracy comes in an array of shapes and styles. Think of democracy as a pair of shoes. One person may like size 10 loafers. But what if that person decides that someone with a size 8 or a size 12 foot should also wear size 10 loafers? What if the chosen someone happens to live and work in the arctic?

Abraham Lincoln understood the true meaning of democracy. In his Gettysburg Address he stated it quite succinctly as, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It must be a government defined by an electorate, controlled by an electorate and which serves the electorate. Nothing else will do.

Where we stumble is in the flawed belief that global democracy will yield a sort of democratic uniformity and that is simply nonsense. Any given people will shape their democratic system and institutions to accommodate their own cultural, religious, social, ethnic and traditional values. American democracy has had more than two centuries to adapt to American values but even there it had to endure major challenges such as civil war, slavery, universal suffrage. How could that model possibly suit some other nation with so many values different than our own?

When a people exercise their democratic franchise, we’re not always happy with the result. The Palestinian people chose Hamas as their leaders and some Shia Lebanese gave Hezbollah a number of seats in the Lebanese government. Washington is furious about those events and has learned to be wary of what democracy might bring to strategic Middle Eastern allies such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Since the Second World War, America hasn’t always supported democracy. In Iran it toppled the democratically-elected government and installed the Shah and a brutal, police state in its stead. In Chile, America collaborated with the generals to stage a coup and murder the elected President, Salvador Allende. The U.S. has also freely used its power and wealth to manipulate elections in other nations such as Afghanistan and the Ukraine. Imagine if the European Union decided to covertly send massive amounts of money to America to help topple the Republican government.

Democracy is like a living thing. The idea needs to be planted when the conditions are right for it to take hold. It needs to be nurtured and tended. If all the necessary conditions are in place it might grow but it is going to begin as a mere, fragile seedling. With time, and a lot of luck, it may become a tree but, even then, that tree will be a creature of its immediate environment.

In 1988, Patrick Watson, one of the finest journalists ever to come out of the CBC, crafted an excellent, 10-part series called, “The Struggle for Democracy.” Part of the programme entailed a survey of widely different styles of democracy that had emerged in different corners of the world. I was lucky enough to have watched Watson’s ‘Democracy.’ 28-years later, this would probably be a good time for CBC to air an updated version of the original.

We need to be both realistic and infinitely patient in our expectations and demands for the spread of democracy. Remember, it took Western civilization the better part of two millenia to evolve the democratic institutions we take for granted today and there were many conflicts and setbacks along the way. Introducing and establishing democracy in a place where it has never been is so much more than just changing a form of government or rule. Democracy by its very nature impacts other aspects of society whether that be cultural, ethnic, religious, social or economic. Each must adapt to the others and to a new order. That takes time and a lot of trial and error if it is to succeed. Just as we have learned to accept and respect other religions and cultures, so we need to learn to respect democracy in all its forms and at all its stages even if other democratic states aren’t to our political or economic liking.

21 August, 2006 – This Just In

Word is beginning to circulate in Washington that the Bush administration is having second thoughts about democracy for Iraq. An article in today’s “The Australian” following up an article published last week in “The New York Times” quotes an anonymous military affairs expert who attended a White House briefing and reported, “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy (for Iraq).”

Sunday Times reporter, Andrew Sullivan notes, “There comes a point at which even Bush’s platinum-strength levels of denial have to bow to reality. That point may be now. …Recently Bush has been wondering why the Shi’ites in southern Iraq have displayed such ingratitude to the man who liberated them from Saddam. It does not seem to have occurred to him that a populace terrorised by invasion, sectarian murder, non-existent government and near anarchy might feel angry at the man who rid them of dictatorship but then refused to provide a minimal level of security for the aftermath. And so, the frustrated born-again neocon in Bush may be ceding to the caucus of those dubbed the “to-hell-with-them” hawks.

So much for the hollow promise of occupying Iraq to plant the seed of democracy in the Muslim world. The flimsy weapons of mass destruction thing slipped through Bush’s fingers a long time ago as did Baghdad as a supporter of international terrorism. They’re down to Saddam, that’s all they have left to justify this fiasco and, if America does move to instal another dictator in Iraq, then this whole business was a hideous, horrid mistake, an utter FUBAR.

This morning’s Globe & Mail has a headline that exults in Canada’s awesome victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan yesterday. I guess it’s supposed to be a bit of good news to wipe away the grief Canadians have felt over the succession of deaths of our own over the past month. It’s even got a body count and it looks as though we killed a few dozen insurgents for no losses of our own. I guess that’s it then. We should probably tell the Taliban where we would like them to line up to surrender.

We’re now using body counts to measure victory. It has come to that. What a powerful instrument of self-delusion. It’s not a matter of how many we kill, it’s a matter of how many will come in to replace them. It isn’t a matter of wiping out a bunch of insurgents at one village, it’s which side will control this village in a few days when we’ve gone back to the safety of our garrison. When it really comes down to it, it’s a matter of which side has the will to outlast the other. In their decade-long war in Vietnam, US forces never lost a battle, not one. They killed their enemies by the hundreds of thousands. The only thing the Americans lost in Vietnam was the war itself.

I guess in politics, timing is everything. Poor Stephen Harper. Canada’s pretend prime minister took over just in time to see those he most wants to emulate, George Bush and Tony Blair, crash and burn in their own countries. We know from an article Harper wrote to an American paper back in 2003 that, back then, he would’ve been delighted to be prime minister and send Canadian soldiers into Iraq. Harper believes Canada should stand “shoulder to shoulder” with this gang of ideological incompetents. Oh, Canada!