What should be our strategy?
Think about what has worked and what has not worked for us in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Arab world. Consider the various types of regimes, and ask how well we have been able to work with them to achieve American interests:
1) Islamic totalitarian
2) Democracy
3) Kingdom
4) Military strongman
In my view, these are listed in order from worst to best (or least bad), in terms of how well they have worked to align these countries with our interests in general, and with restraining Islamic militancy in particular. If that is correct, then the obvious strategy is to try to replace the Islamic totalitarians (Iran, ISIS, Hamas) with military strongmen.
What is interesting is that no one is proposing this. I would not expect the left to support a policy that favors a military strongman. And I would not expect libertarians to support any attempt to actively shape another country’s political system. But I do not even hear any conservatives proposing such a solution. The neocons thought that democracy was going to be the panacea. Do they still think that?
That’s exactly what I think. In retrospect, if we were going to depose Saddam Hussein, the best replacement for him would have been a less dangerous, more pliable Sunni military dictator. Of course, the Left, and the rest of the world, would have castigated Bush for doing something like that. (I think Krugman wrote a column in 2003, during the runup to the war or early after it started, castigating Bush in advance for putting a new dictator in place, instead of establishing “democracy” as, of course, a good liberal would have done.) And it was contrary to neocon ideology, which held that the Islamic world is a problem primarily because they don’t have democracy (full disclosure: that’s what I thought at the time, and have since wised up). I think the same P.R. dynamics exist today and would prevent any US administration from setting up a relatively benign, nonthreatening military dictatorship. Too bad.
I’m curious what has people so convinced that supporting the democratic Iraqi government would go badly.
Iran is going to oppose any government that is friendly to the U.S., without care for how that government is structured. To the extent that Iran is now pressuring for civil war within Iraq, doesn’t that just mean that the democratic government is actually working, from the perspective of U.S. interests? Even if it just delays Iran’s other plans for a decade or two, that alone gives time for the Irani populace to say enough, we want to join the modern world instead of fight with all of it.
How does the Shah of Iran fit into this? Maybe it is a cycle. We end up at strongman who then has to sabre rattle the west to keep his domestic support. We also seem to attack steongmen at a high rate. So he has to balance being deposed versus being regime changed. This is what I though Saddam was doing pretending to have WMDs. Pretend to thumb your nose at the west to save face at home. If we had simply asked him on the sly he might have told us.
Admitting that the West has a comparative advantage in stable, semi-responsible administration vis a vis the Middle East, and that therefore the most logical response is for western nations to rule the troublesome parts by proxy is just a little too honest and too out of fashion for anyone to state publicly. Instead, the US has to play this three card Monte game, switching support from one faction to another constantly in a half dozen different nations, hoping that eventually something or someone will attain power and a)not screw it up completely, b)hang onto it for a while, and c)return John Kerry’s phone calls.
How do you explain Turkey? It’s somewhere between a democracy and an Islamic state; your theory would predict they’d hate us, but we seem to get along fairly well.
Kemal Ataturk Westernized Turkey after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, so they’ve had closer ties to Europe and the US for some time than much of the rest of the Middle East.
“…..restraining Islamic militancy in particular.”
I found that phrase curious since this post assumes that U.S foreign policy isn’t a direct cause of that very militancy.
I think the more obvious strategy is to leave them to their own ends so long as those ends are internal and deal with them as we find them. If anything, trying to impose our own desires, attempting regime changes doomed to failure and failing in the direction opposed to our desires, seems misguided.
You are not wrong, Lord
The reason conservatives don’t put forth this idea is that they have to continue to argue that deposing Saddam (a military dictator) was an obvious good.