Countries by coercion
by George Jonas
National Post
December 2, 2009
As we're coming up to the sixth anniversary of a dishevelled Saddam Hussein being plucked from his "spider hole" on Dec. 13, 2003, the American-led coalition that toppled his bloody regime is winding down its occupation of Iraq.
It's not a question of Barack Obama turning tail before finishing the job. Under the Status of Forces Agreement, negotiated with the Bush administration before Obama took office, U.S. troops started withdrawing from urban centres in the summer of 2009, and are scheduled to leave Iraq altogether on Dec. 31, 2011.
Are the soldiers leaving too soon or too late? It depends. If the coalition's forces came to dethrone a brutal dictator, they've already stayed six years longer than necessary. If they came to turn Iraq into the Switzerland of the Middle East, they'd probably be leaving too soon even if they stayed another six years.
It might have been unrealistic to expect that parking armies in post-Saddam Iraq would prevent civil war, and it didn't. It was always possible that a country that never particularly wanted to be one, far from becoming the Middle East's first Western-style multicultural democracy, might devolve into its constituent parts. But if it happened; if all efforts at "nation-building" failed; if Iraq split into separate Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish entities, would Saddam have been toppled for nothing?
I suggest no. Toppling tyrants is always salutary.
True, coalition soldiers didn't risk life and limb to anoint some ayatollah in Saddam's place. True, it would be hard for America to stand by while Iraqis substituted hostile theocracies for Saddam's hostile secular regime. True, U.S. taxpayers didn't spend billions only to throw Iraq into chaos.
Yet if the West is serious about one of its war aims, namely that Iraqis must decide their own future, it doesn't matter what future we envisaged for Iraq. Should Iraqis wish to substitute an ayatollah for Saddam, or rupture their fragile federation of ethnic and religious groups, we must remember that the coalition fought a war, at least in part, to enable them to do so.
The Bush administration envisioned a free Arab society, a first in the Middle East, possibly sparking freedom and democracy throughout the region. It was easy to sympathize with the idea. Natan Sharansky, once a well-known Soviet dissident, and later an equally well-known Israeli politician, argued in The Jerusalem Post in the spring of 2003 that "the overwhelming power of freedom" will prove as contagious in the Middle East as it was in the Soviet Union.
Freedom didn't turn out to be contagious. Submission did, the Arabic word for Islam. The chant during a pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala in 2003 was "No to America, No to Saddam, Yes to Islam." As Daniel Pipes pointed out in the New York Post, "'Yes to Islam' in effect means 'Yes to Iranian-style militant Islam.'" Dr. Pipes reasoned that, considering that it took six centuries for democracy to develop in England, we couldn't expect it to develop overnight in Iraq. For the interim, he recommended "a democratically-minded Iraqi strongman" to hold the country together and keep it from sliding into either anarchy or the lap of a theocratic tyrant.
One could see Dr. Pipes's point. After all, strongmen such as Kemal Ataturk and Chang Kai-shek paved the way to democracy in Turkey and Taiwan, however imperfect, while it was democracy in the Weimar Republic that paved the way to Hitler. When people are free to choose, they sometimes make the wrong choice.
Except strongmen are rarely democratically-minded. Usually they're as bloody-minded as Saddam.
If Iraq's Shia majority were to choose a theocratic tyrant, hostile to the West, it would take us back to square one. But does it follow that the Iraqis would necessarily benefit from maintaining a unified country by coercion, Saddamite or not? Must we vacuum-pack something artificially created in the 1920s, under different geopolitical circumstances?
Why oppose, for instance, the emergence of a friendly, independent Kurdistan?
One obvious answer is not to upset friendly Turkey (getting less friendly by the minute). But another answer goes beyond regional stability. We've become so committed to multicultural ideals that we consider all other models of nationhood anathema.
But what's sacrosanct about existing countries if they need to be held together by straitjackets? Why spill blood in the 21st century to preserve an entity like Iraq, carved out of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century, primarily for the former British Empire's reasons of state? Not that there would be anything wrong with a country, even if born, as Iraq was, mainly of British author and not-so-secret agent Gertrude Bell's fancies, if it had internal coherence and viability -- but if it can't breathe on its own, why put it on a respirator?
I think our abhorrence of the ethnically (or religiously) based nation-state is a mistake. Worshipping "multiculturalism" as the only legitimate way for a modern state to be organized is as wrong as worshipping tribalism would be. History records many organizing principles. What works, works; what doesn't, doesn't. There's nothing big about a country that doesn't want to be one.