Positive Liberty

I seldom write about foreign policy, as I am acutely aware that most of my blog neighbors don’t agree with me at all about it. At the risk of angering them, I’ve decided to post this anyway. If you don’t want to read it, no one is forcing you.

It’s struck me lately that the difference between “success” and “failure” in Iraq has been shrinking dramatically. It used to be that “success” meant being greeted in the streets by throngs of adoring Iraqis who would shower our troops with roses. Then “success” meant a speedy end to the insurgency–and again, we did not succeed. Now, though, “success” seems to mean achieving a single more or less democratic election, with some tolerable nonzero amount of violence, regardless of how bad the subsequent government may eventually become.

Early indications suggest that the government we are helping to set up is going to be downright awful. Let’s look at the polls. Juan Cole reports that a theocratic government seems to be the overwhelming preference of the Iraqi electorate. Is this why we went to war? To transfer Iraq from one set of repressive thugs to another? With one democratic election in the meantime?

I’m not against democracy, but democracy without individual rights is even worse than pure dictatorship–because the stamp of democracy, and of American intervention, will only serve to make both democracy and America look bad. Worse, the future Iraqi state is still very likely to be a haven for terrorists. In other words, we have now defined success so low that it cannot be distinguished from failure.

I know, I know, I’ve heard the standard smear before: “You’re not really anti-war. You’re just on the other side.” Nonsense. The idea that I side with the terrorists is a charge that I don’t feel the need to refute, particularly when our own government is going through the elaborate motions of turning Iraq into a fundamentalist state that will no doubt sponsor terrorism at the very soonest opportunity. And when I say that this is wrong, I am the one who is siding with the terrorists? Unbelievable.

The United States, of course, does not officially want to see Iraq go the way of Iran, and I certainly don’t want to see it either. But the implacable logic of democracy–and of fighting a war for democracy–would seem to demand no less. What all of this shows is the terrible mistake of fighting for democracy in the first place: Would that we had fought instead for individual rights, for freedom of conscience, and for women’s autonomy, all of which are far more important than the democratic choice of which intolerant thugs get to run a certain hostile country.

But given the overwhelming support for various forms of thuggery among the Iraqi electorate, we’ve got no choice but to define success downward, until whatever we end up with can in some fashion be called a success. Americans always like to succeed, and when success gets really hard, they change the rules of the game.

In that vein, I suspect that the best option for us–and I hesitate to use the word “best”–is to allow Iraq to devolve into a state something like Pakistan: stable, rigidly-controlled, dictatorial, and nominally pro-Western.

It’s not impossible that a coalition might emerge from Iraq’s upcoming elections that will take the Pakistani route. What is absurd, though, is to think that a government drawn from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Party, and a slate supported by Muqtada al-Sadr, is somehow going to arrive at a decent respect for individual rights. It ain’t going to happen.

Iraq would be better off if it were more like Pakistan, but let’s also not forget that an authoritarian state like Pakistan is inherently unworthy of trust. In a better world, Pakistan’s role in exporting nuclear technology would make it a prime enemy of the United States, not a friend. Only one thing keeps Pervez Musharraf in America’s orbit, and that is the hope for American aid in exchange for helping hunt down al Qaida. It is not a stand that Pakistan takes out of principle; recall that before 9/11, Musharraf’s regime consistently sided with Osama bin Laden. Friends like these cannot be trusted, and I suspect that the future Iraq will be no different.

I further suspect that someone in the Pakistani government has already grasped a very simple truth: Find Osama, and the American aid dries up. It’s in Pakistan’s best interest to prolong the war on terror as much as possible, scoring weapon systems, international aid, and loans to shore up its economy–all in preparation for a strike against India, a liberal democracy that would in a saner foreign policy be our one real friend in the region. The Pakistanis are making a killing by playing the United States off against its allies, and the future dictators of Iraq are no doubt taking notes.

What kind of friend do we have in Pakistan? Aside from its other failings, Pakistan refuses to hold democratic elections, oppresses political dissidents, and generally tramples on individual rights. In the best case scenario, that’s probably what we are creating in Iraq right now; that’s what our soldiers are dying for; and that’s the best possible outcome that I can see.

In other words, “success” in Iraq means destroying Iraq’s officially hostile fascist regime–and replacing it with a nominally friendly fascist regime, one that will milk us for all we are worth and stab us in the back at the soonest possible opportunity. And we will applaud this success in the very near future, because we are tired of war, and because it feels nice to be a success.

Let’s also not forget that the war in Iraq has been a terrible distraction from the war that we ought to be waging: a war on Islamic militancy. Invading Iran, not Iraq, would have done a better job of addressing that problem. Much more than Iraq, Iran was an open, enthusiastic state sponsor of terrorism. Iraq certainly has sponsored terrorism, of course, but Iran has bragged about it incessantly. Iran, not Iraq, turned terrorism into a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

Iran has had–and continues to have–a nuclear weapons program that far surpasses Iraq’s. The Islamic Republic also has significant pro-Western dissident factions that would be eager to support a regime change. By contrast, Iraq’s pro-Western dissidents were mostly illusory. (The real Iraqi dissidents were anti-American Islamic fundamentalists who just happened to hate Saddam Hussein besides.)

And frankly, some of us saw this coming a very long way off. Can you understand now why we opposed the Iraq war?

Amid all this confusion, let me suggest that we forget about Iran, Pakistan, and even Iraq for the moment. If we are to focus not on democracy, but on the much more important issues of individual rights, then the real source of our woes lies elsewhere. It may not be easy to admit, but our real enemy is Saudi Arabia.

The ideology of terror is Saudi in its inspiration, Saudi in its justification, and Saudi in its funding. The religious seal of approval, the linchpin of the entire system, comes once again from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are the real enemies. They are last absolute monarchy on the planet and the most authoritarian state this side of North Korea. More importantly, with the demise of the Taliban the Saudis are now the most repressive, misogynist, illiberal, and intolerant country in the entire world, and they use their wealth to spread repression, misogyny, illiberalism, and intolerance wherever they can.

Saudi Arabia represents the most perfect antithesis of American values to be found anywhere in the world, and until we address it directly, our foreign policy woes will only continue. Iraq may or may not be a branch on the much larger tree of terrorism–but the roots of the tree? We haven’t even come close.