"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

People want security and order before democracy

As we also see in Russia these days. Excerpt below from Thomas Sowell

The great tragic failure in Iraq has been political failure, not military failure. At the heart of that failure have been two lofty notions - "nation-building" and democracy.

Nations cannot be built. You can transplant institutions from one country to another, but you cannot transplant the history and culture from which the attitudes and traditions evolved that enable those institutions to work. It took centuries for democracy to evolve in the Western world. Yet we tried to create democracy in Iraq before we created the security - the law and order - that is a prerequisite for any form of viable government.

Having made democracy the centerpiece of the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, Americans have been hamstrung by the inadequacies of that government and the fact that our military could not simply ignore the Iraqi government when its politicians got in the way of restoring law and order.

People will support tyranny before they will support anarchy. Both can be avoided by creating an interim government based on competence, rather than on its being an embodiment of democratic ideals.

Neither in Europe nor in Asia did today's democracies begin as democracies. As late as 1950, no one could have called Taiwan or South Korea democracies. Even today, Singapore does not have the kind of freedom that Westerners regard as democratic. But it is a decent and prosperous society, vastly superior in every way to what it was at the end of World War II.

Trying to create democracy in places where it has never existed - and where the prerequisites for democracy may not exist - has been a needless gamble. Among those prerequisites are a toleration of different views, an accommodation of different interests, and a willingness to put the national interest above one's own. The Middle East is the last place to look for such qualities. Such things evolved in the West only after centuries of different religions and peoples trying unsuccessfully to destroy each other.

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2 comments:

M. Simon said...

Where ever people are involved things get very complicated.

M. Simon said...

BTW democracy, in an attenuated and unsuccessful form has existed in Iraq before. I believe Saddam's cohorts overthrew a democracy in order to take power.

It is not barren soil. It is not the most fertile either.

They do have 12 or 13 years of the Kurdish example.

Maybe what they need is a Federal system. If we have enough time to muddle through we will figure it out.