The Slippery Slope Into the War in Iraq, and the Failures of Democratic Nation-Building

From Common Sense for a Time of Crisis:

Addressed to the Citizens of the United States: A People that sacrifices its liberties to achieve security is deserving of neither, and will end up losing both-- "Without Vision, the People Perish!"

Because of the fundamental confusion of private and public interests in framing the rationale, policy, and the means for going to war in Iraq, the United States was doomed to get bogged down in a tragic quagmire because it took upon itself an ideologically-motivated mission of democratic nation-building, without having first rediscovered for itself what democratic institutions for its own self-government were required of both the leaders and agents of democracy in any country.

Democratic institutions within the United States were already failing, for lack of understanding and nurturing, and in such a context of self-inflicted blindness the new executive of the United States took up a mission of democratic nation-building in Iraq. From the beginning, unfortunately and tragically for all, this was a mission of the blind leading the blind.

The failure of this imperial mission, for anyone with eyes to see, was inevitable. Without Vision, the people and democracy both perish. And it has become all too obvious that beyond the lies that helped move the United States into war, the fundamental lack of democratic vision made the people and institutions of the nation not only susceptible to being manipulated by those lies, but set it up to fail utterly in the fundamental tasks of democratic nation-building once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown.

If the new leadership that took over the White House in 2001 had, for example, paused for just a moment to consider the first and most basic principle of democratic nation-building, which is that you cannot impose democracy on a people by military means, our government would not have made the first great mistake in the conduct of the Iraq War, which was to assume that the only important planning was the military planning that went into overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Anyone truly interested in, and committed to, democratic nation-building at home or abroad understands that the second key principle of democracy building is the need to support, nurture, and provide a secure and safe environment for the development of the civil institutions of democratic society. Such understanding would have put a premium [as the United States did after World War II in its occupations of Germany and Japan,] on the importance of providing the kinds of military police and security forces that would have established secure order and peace, immediately after the formal end of the war.

That neither of these two fundamental principles seems to have been clearly comprehended, either by the executive administration, the Congress, or the Press (which was largely uncritical of the conduct of the war), only underlines the degree to which the basic understanding of the fundamental institutional prerequisites of democracy had disintegrated among the political and cultural leadership of the United States.

But because our country’s leadership is by no means simply stupid, we must enquire more deeply into the reasons this most basic understanding of the two primary principles of democratic nation-building was so easily and completely ignored in the conduct of the Iraq War--in ways that have had fatal consequences for not only every family of the 2400+ US soldiers killed, and the tens of thousands maimed in Iraq since May 2003, but also for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed since Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” victory speech on the deck of the USS Lincoln.

Why were these fundamental democratic principles of nation-building not part of the planning or conduct of the war in Iraq? If they had been, the insurgency might have been suppressed from the beginning, and tens of thousands of American casualties, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, might have been spared.

This is where the confusion between private and public interests becomes pivotal for understanding the failures of not only the war in Iraq, and the so-called war on terrorism, but also the ongoing failures of our government’s response to Katrina, and its failure to serve the real needs of national security and civil liberty within the United States. In the absence of clear distinctions between public and private interest, and the democratic vision that can develop only on the basis of such distinctions, these failures, and many others yet to come, are inevitable.

In the absence of any clear distinction between private corporate interest and the common good of the peoples of the United States and Iraq, the military intervention became a corrupt game of war profiteering, and the profits of the few came at the price of the blood of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians.