Is Democracy Always Best? 

Is Democracy Always Best?

Any commentary like this is likely to seem a cheap shot at best to Bush supporters right now. Once committed to an election in Iraq, they had to stick to it no matter what, they believed, or an admittedly "dynamic" situation would have grown even worse. That might be true.

Nevertheless, some thoughts: the Toronto Star today:

The U.S. forced an election in Somalia in the 90s; that didn't work out very well. There are many countries today where "Democracy is flourishing, liberty is not," as Fareed Zakaria is quoted as saying in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom. Zakaria "noted Paddy Ashdown's assessment of the Bosnia example: 'We thought that democracy was the highest priority, and we measured it by the number of elections we could organize. The result even years later is that the people of Bosnia have grown weary of voting ... The focus on elections slowed our efforts to tackle organized crime and corruption, which have jeopardized quality of life and scared off foreign investment.'"

Security first, democracy second, seems to be the advice here:

"I think democracy tends to perpetuate security but it doesn't create it," says Dobbins, now the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center, a think-tank in Arlington, Va. "If you can create a secure environment, democracy is probably the best way of ensuring that it's sustained. It creates a more predictable, less arbitrary form of governance."


Of course, that was plan A for the U.S.: security and infrastructure first. It just didn't work out quite as planned.

If Bush is influenced by a thinker/author, it might be Natan Sharansky, once a famous dissident in the Soviet Union. What does he have to say, according to Slate? His main emphasis is on the "town square test"--institutional and widely accepted protection of the right to dissent. Democracy generally is a good support for this kind of liberalism--but they don't necessarily go together. Elections are not truly free, he says, if they are held in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. As much as anything, Sharansky, now a Cabinet Minister in Israel, is skeptical of Palestinian elections.

Someone on the Corner has mentioned, almost in passing, that democratic Turkey is more oppressive to its Christian minority than non-democratic Syria. These examples are no doubt both on the minds of many Sunnis in Iraq.

UPDATE: Mark Helprin
again:

But no law of nature says a democracy is incapable of supporting terrorism, so even if every Islamic capital were to become a kind of Westminster with curlicues, the objective of suppressing terrorism might still find its death in the inadequacy of the premise. Even if all the Islamic states became democracies, the kind of democracies they might become might not be the kind of democracies wrongly presumed to be incapable of supporting terrorism. And if Iraq were to become the kind of democracy that is the kind wrongly presumed (and for more than a short period), there is no evidence whatsoever that other Arab or Islamic states, without benefit of occupying armies, would follow.

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