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“Iraq the Model” Sides with Assad

Paul Pillar observes that U.S.-led democratization in Iraq has created a government that is authoritarian at home and supportive of the Syrian crackdown: And what is the posture of the Iraqi regime toward the Arab Spring, specifically next door in Syria, which is currently the hottest front line in the confrontation between freedom and authoritarianism? […]

Paul Pillar observes that U.S.-led democratization in Iraq has created a government that is authoritarian at home and supportive of the Syrian crackdown:

And what is the posture of the Iraqi regime toward the Arab Spring, specifically next door in Syria, which is currently the hottest front line in the confrontation between freedom and authoritarianism? Maliki is maintaining a distinctively friendly posture toward the Assad regime, while that regime is gunning down protestors in Syrian cities. He has urged the protestors not to “sabotage” the regime and has recently hosted an official Syrian delegation. The would-be lead domino, far from inspiring freedom in a neighboring country, is on the side opposing freedom.

It never hurts to remind people that neoconservative policies of the previous administration failed, and that they did so on their own terms. Remember when the new democratized Iraq was supposed to continue being a bulwark against Iran? No one was ever able to explain why that was going happen. Meanwhile, Iraq’s sectarian politics is hardly an encouraging sign for the future of a democratic Syria. Before the invasion and during the early years of the occupation, the public was repeatedly told that sectarianism would not be a problem in Iraq, but it was. It was the natural product of state collapse, insecurity, and the politicization of communal identities through elections.

There are a few things to take away from this. The most obvious and the one that keeps being forgotten is that democratization is no protection against illiberal political culture or populist authoritarianism, and it can lead directly to both. It should also reminds us that democratically-elected governments are not always going to share the democratic missionary impulse that many Americans have, nor are they going to make the political crises of their neighbors their business unless they see some advantage in exploiting those crises. The last neoconservative fantasy about Iraq has been fully discredited when the government of “Iraq the model” is siding with the Baathist dictatorship of Syria against Syrian protesters. Even so, we shouldn’t get the wrong idea that the Iraqi government would take a different position if it were a liberal democratic one rather than a sectarian, authoritarian one. That would be to make the same mistake that informed the disastrous misjudgment behind U.S.-led democracy promotion in the previous decade.

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