Brian Whittaker has another good commentary piece in today’s Guardian analyzing the cross-identification of the Arab street with anti-war Westerners. One thing that struck me - and Whittaker has written on this before - is the term “creative destruction” used by some right-hawk ideologues to summarize the plan for democratization in Iraq. The term seems to have originated in a National Review commentary (available here) by an American Enterprise Institute fellow: “Creative destruction is our [America’s] middle name,” it says. The term has been taken up approvingly by a number of commentators, (see here and here).
Which makes me wonder: isn’t the concept, even as metaphor, being stretched beyond usefulness? First put forth by Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction refers to the kinds of periodic waves in the evolution of capitalist economies in which previous modes of production become swept away and previous configurations of labor become dislocated. As far as I can follow, it specifically refers to market forces which drive individual producers to adopt higher-productivity methods, even if in the long run, new technology will simply mean lower prices, not higher profits.
Now, it’s bad enough when a concept becomes reduced to a buzzword (New Economy boosters, for instance, loved to talk of creative destruction, even though the logic of it would likely mean that future profits wouldn’t justify high stock prices). But its application to geopolitics seems especially forced and tenuous. Creative destruction is a concept to describe the way internal processes bring about a system’s undoing, a dialectic if you will. Invading Iraq is doing absolutely nothing to speed along processes currently happening - it is simply imposing military might. The process looks more like old fashioned destruction or at best Clintonian nation-building. And as an invisible hand process, creative destruction isn’t simply a matter of applying a conscious policy, nor is it owned by one country, even one as liberalized as the U.S. (Our most prosperous period, the postwar years, in fact were notable for their lack of creative destruction and the preponderance of oligopoly, not competition).
Certainly one could overlook a couple of op-eds if there wasn’t a direct tie between the AEI and Richard Perle’s advice to the President. In the absense of any reasonable vision of how occupation of Iraq would spread democracy anywhere, we have to examine the possibility that an over-simplified application of neo-con jargon is behind all of this.
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