At what level of participation, Brent Scowcroft, can the objective of democratizing a hellhole of Middle Eastern totalitarianism be deemed a partial success? After how many inspiring elections, Howard Dean, can the trope about exporting freedom at the end of a gun be buried? ~Jonathan Gurwitz, MySanAntonio.com

I don’t know who Jonathan Gurwitz is, but I am fairly confident that he doesn’t know much about the “freedom and democracy” he so enthusiastically preaches. He knows the right buzzwords–he even knows to attack paleoconservatives by name! But there is little else. Leave aside those little, technical details (such as the banning of dozens of Sunni candidates for Baathist ties in a blatantly sectarian move by Shi’ites) for a moment, and let’s see if we can’t help Mr. Gurwitz with his weak rhetorical questions.

Three elections do not establish the political habits necessary to create a self-sustaining representative government or a system of electoral politics. Perhaps if–and I do stress if–Iraqis manage the same feat on a regular basis for another 30 years we can say that they have created something lasting and potentially better than what preceded it (it rather depends on whom they elect and what their elected governments do–having elected governments is perhaps the most overrated thing today). I really do hate to invoke the endlessly invoked analogy, but in 1918-19 Wilson believed he was freeing people from the “prison house of nations” (ooh, look, self-determination!) and ended up laying the groundwork for massive instability, authoritarianism and war. Even though Austrians and Germans had been freely voting for decades, he thought it a good idea to “teach them to elect good men,” and we all know, from reminders ad nauseam, whom the Germans eventually elected. Given the choice in 1945 between the Kaiser and the ruin that republican democracy had brought them (which is to say, the ruin they had ultimately brought on themselves through their blessed voting), any sane German would have chosen the Kaiser. When modern democracy succeeds, it is ugly, stupid and generally undesirable, but usually only moderately abusive, and when it fails it fails catastrophically. I would not wish such a system on my enemy.

Iraqis today are not free (it does take a wee bit more than the absence of a dictator to be free), and voting does not make someone free so long as he endorses a government dedicated to inculcating dependency on the state in one form or another. Indeed, voting is in most respects a strange and often servile act: it is an egoistic claim to power rendered meaningless by its frequent repetition and widespread imitation. Indeed, the more often one votes under an unfree regime (as most Westerners do), the more deeply implicated in and committed to the unfree regime one becomes.

At the moment, Iraqis find elections exciting and inspiring because they have scarcely seen the sorts of governments elections produce, especially the results of elections outside of the Western world. Their government will likely be venal, corrupt, nepotistic, equally heavy-handed and ineffectual in many parts of the country and will become about as popular as Alejandro Toledo is right now in Peru (he, too, was once the bright face of democratic Peru, and he, like old Evo, marked the rise to power of the Indians of that country). Now poor Mr. Toledo is reviled, because he persisted in the now much-despised “neoliberalism” of the ’90s, his government is a failure, the Shining Path has begun to return in small numbers and the nostlagia for the Fujimori years has been such that Fujimori himself was daft enough to try to return to Peru, where he is a wanted man, to run for re-election! (Fujimori was arrested in Chile at the request of Lima, and will probably soon be extradited.) Now Ollanta Humala, currently leading in the polls, proposes a nationalist and at least slightly collectivist Evo-like platform, and his main contender is an old left-wing populist, former President Alan Garcia, who presided over the ruinous pre-Fujimori years. That is the alternative a “successful” democracy offers in the developing world.

The Iraqi state has been destroyed, and the apparatus of socialism on which the majority depended in the past is probably going to be sorely missed and will be one of the priorities of any new government. Iraq is not and will not be a free country in any meaningful sense–that people will probably be actively choosing dependency on the state will only confirm that Iraqis are not a free people. All local political traditions in the country point towards a politics of collectivism of various kinds, whether conceived of in secular leftist terms or Islamic rhetoric about justice and “the community.”

Collectivist polities divided along sectarian and ethnic lines become places of heated and explosive rivalries over relatively scarce resources–collectivism, especially if it is not to end in bloodshed and expropriation, takes root far better in homogenous populations. If pundits think that the “pro-Western liberals” (read foreign-backed subversives) have a hard time of it in Russia, for example, which has had at least some experience with representative government in its past, just consider how much more difficult it will be for it to take hold in Iraq. The best–and I do mean the best–we may reasonably hope for in Iraq is a sort of Putinesque supermajority organisation of politics that represents a broad consensus.

Anyone who believes simultaneously, as many war supporters seem to, that Evo Morales is a nightmare and the beginning of the end of whatever free government Bolivia has and imagines that democratic Iraq will be different from Bolivia is a fool. (Likewise, on the opposite side of the spectrum, any leftist who thinks MAS represents “freedom and democracy” but finds Iraqi democracy questionable is equally a fool–they are one and the same phenomenon at different stages of development.)

Democracy in such countries as Iraq and Bolivia, especially when it “works,” routinely means instability and socialism (the only sort of mass ideology with much resonance in Latin America or the Near East). The eastern Bolivian elites to pursue so-called “neoliberal” policies in a departure from this tendency quickly met their political end. Any pro-Western managerial elite that attempts the same may remain in power, but it will be an obvious fraud and a standing rebuke to the nonsense of democratising the Near East. If the country is undergoing the throes of modernisation or, as will be the case in Iraq, “globalisation,” you can reasonably expect nationalist, revanchist and various other forms of “palingenetic” politics.

In Iraq’s case, they have the added excitement of potential mass theocracy and ethnic separatism that have never created a lasting representative sytem of government yet. The habits of being a free people cannot be learned overnight, if they can ever really be learned and retained at all by a people entirely unfamiliar with them, and it is extremely difficult to learn them when they are expressed in an entirely alien idiom using, as it were, an entirely different kind of grammar. Translation is theoretically possible, but it will always be awkward, much will be lost and the original content will be distorted significantly. When the ‘translators’ are virtual illiterates in their own political language (indeed, some of them do not know the language very well at all), the task is hopeless. Such is the case with Iraq.