Kicking out Depots is a Losing Strategy

Adam Seitchik

November 2003

If the justification for invading Iraq has shifted from weapons of mass destruction to freeing the Iraqi people, it’s time to raise taxes, reinstate the universal draft and get busy.  Liberating the world’s oppressed will be more than a full-time job.  Freedom House has been rating how free countries are with respect to civil and political rights since 1972.  Most Western European and North American countries get near-perfect scores, close to 1.0.  On a scale from one to seven, a country which averages 5.5 to 7.0 is considered “not free.”

If our new worldwide mission is to invade countries to rid them of despots and install democracies, the Freedom House list would be a good starting point.  Alphabetically, the first country in the not-free category is Afghanistan.  That’s work in progress.  Next would be Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Bhutan, Brunei, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chad, China (reminder to Wolfowitz: 400 nuclear warheads and 2.5 million troops!), Congo and Cuba.

To be fair, the A-C group is packed with authoritarian regimes.  After that it gets a bit easier.  The next six liberations of the non-free would get us all the way through D, E, F, G, H, I and J: Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guinea, Haiti and Iran.  With Iraq already done, the Bush Administration could be getting ready to take on Kazakhstan and Kenya with only 20 more invasions.

President Bush supports “freedom” around the world.  But freedom is in fact a complex, multifaceted organizing principle.  The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in place since 1948, lists many individual rights common to the American Constitution, including life, liberty, freedom of religion, freedom from torture and arbitrary arrest.  Going further, the UN’s Declaration expands the notion of freedom to include the individual’s right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security… in circumstances beyond his control.”

The UN Declaration goes on to enumerate other rights for each and every earthling including the right to work, to protection against unemployment, and to “just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”

Obviously, there are billions of people around the world denied such rights, with lives completely circumscribed by poverty.  The World Bank defines a “low-income” country as one with per capita national income of about $700 or less, which is 2% of the US average.  There are 70 countries in this desperately poor category.  How free are their people?  Denied the right to an adequate standard of living as defined in the UN’s Declaration, is it any wonder that they do not perceive free elections as their number one priority?

The fantasy of creating an American-style democracy in Iraq is belied by a recent survey conducted by Iraq's Centre for Research and Strategic Studies.  Two-thirds of Iraqis see America as an occupying power, and a majority desire an Islamist government.  There is even more support for a theocracy (33%) than for the kind of limited Islamic “democracy” modeled after Iran (22%).  Democracy can be supported from without, but with rare exceptions it must be born from within.  Kicking out the despot is easy.  Creating the culture and conditions which support democracy is difficult, and near-impossible to impose on an unreceptive populace.

Poor countries need to find their own path to freedom and development, at their own pace in ways that are consistent with their unique culture and history.  If we can help them on their self-defined path without compromising our values, we should.  But the bar for interventionist nation building should be set extremely high.

There have been times since the end of the Cold War when we were morally obligated to act forcefully and did not, for example to stop the genocides of the Kurdish Iraqis, Bosnian Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis.  The tragedy and irony of the unnecessary Iraq invasion is that when there has been an urgent moral requirement to intervene outside of our borders, we have generally failed to respond.  While commander of NATO in Europe, General Wesley Clark argued for quick, decisive action to stop the slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo, including the use of ground troops if necessary.  He was relieved of his duties.  As Samantha Power says in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on America’s failed response to 20^th century genocides, “favoring humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move.”

We need to endorse a “free market” in how countries organize themselves, promoting democracy, human rights and anti-poverty programs without threats or bullying.  While it is true we were able to install democratic governments in Germany and Japan after World War II, these were industrial giants which have proved to be exceptional.  Even democratizing “success stories” throughout Latin America still suffer from widespread poverty and social exclusion, despite two decades of market liberalization.  Many are now rethinking their social models.  The Bolivians, for example, are distancing themselves from American-style development solutions that have done nothing to alleviate the poverty suffered by two-thirds of their population.

Our attitude toward poor countries should be flexible and supportive, not doctrinaire and proscriptive.  Let’s save our bombast and aggression for genocidal regimes and those which clearly threaten the United States or its democratic allies.