After yesterday’s post, I should point out that Michael Kraig has a must-read post over at Democracy Arsenal on the Iraq War. He examines a couple of misguided assumptions about the war, including the notion that anti-Americanism is simple an escape valve for internal oppression.
I find on Democracy Arsenal (and other blogs) a certain amount of agreement with the status quo policy conception that the anger in the Middle East is due to internal, domestic repression/oppression/injustice under autocratic governments, and that the anger toward Israel, the West, the US, and the globalizing world order is a byproduct of this, or an escape valve for this. Indeed, I’ve heard this from numerous US officials and non-officials throughout my work for the Stanley Foundation; you could almost call it a standing epistemic agreement in the US policy community.
Unfortunately, it’s wrong — or at least, half-wrong. There is of course an “escape valve” factor at work here. But after traveling to the Near East and the Persian Gulf for a combined total of two months this year… what I found was nearly everyone saying that “democracy” is not just about internal practices — there is also an international dimension to justice, development, and democracy. And this is where anger toward perceived neo-colonialist aggression, not too different from the British mandate in Egypt and the French mandate in Lebanon and Syria, comes in. The truth is that people feel oppressed at one in and the same time by their own governments (internally) AND by perceived anti-Islamic, anti-Arab forces at the international or global level (externally), and neither of these exists in a vacuum apart from the other.
Of course, there are two arguments to have engaged in a military campaign to democratize Iraq. The first is simply a moral one, that totalitarian governments are bad and should be overthrown from outside if possible (note that we haven’t applied that argument any place else). But the second is the one the neoconservatives and liberal hawks both share, and is the working assumption of the Bush adminstration: democratizing the Middle East is the only way to ease the “steam” pushing out of the escape valve. Ultimately, the test for this war will not be whether Iraq becomes a stable representative democracy, but whether democratization per se will ease anti-American sentiment. Keep in mind that Iraq was a country lacking the sort of popular (as opposed to governmental) anti-Americanism its neighbors had.
Note, by the way, how we’re perfectly willing to treat the opinions of the people of the Arab world as superstructure when we don’t apply that superstructural analysis to ourselves.
No comments have been added to this post yet.