L
iberation
and democracy came late as an alleged major goal of the Bush administration
in its invasion-occupation of Iraq. Despite this lateness, and a
vast array of reasons and evidence that at best only a nominal or
“Arab façade”democracy was on the Bush agenda, to
a remarkable degree the mainstream U.S. media, pundits— including
many liberal pundits—as well as the UN and other members of
the “international community” quickly accepted the notion
of a democratic aim. This, of course, has served the Bush administration
well, transforming a major act of aggression and violation of the
UN Charter, and a brutal, destructive, exploitative, and illegal
occupation, into a pursuit of noble ends, including “stability”—which
the invasion-occupation destroyed—as a supposed means to democracy.
This dubious acceptance of a creditable objective was an important
feature of the media’s and establishment intellectuals’
treatment of the Vietnam War almost a half century back. The U.S.
aims at that time were always treated as benevolent: repelling “aggression,”
protecting “South Vietnam,” and helping to give the southern
Vietnamese the right to “self-determination.” The evidence
that the National Liberation Front (NLF) had mass support whereas
the U.S.-imposed client government had very little, that “South
Vietnam” was an artificial U.S. creation, and that most of
the fighting and killing by the United States was of South Vietnamese
in the southern part of Vietnam, that “self-determination”
was precisely what the United States was fighting against, and that
only the United States was the external aggressor, never caused
the media to challenge the claimed noble ends (or to identify this
as a case of U.S. aggression).
The client government of the southern part of Vietnam was a classic
puppet. U.S. General Maxwell Taylor pointed out in internal communications
that we could replace a recalcitrant or ineffective leader with
another of our choice whenever deemed desirable. In its later years
this government was manned by U.S.-selected former mercenaries of
the earlier French colonial regime who openly acknowledged their
inability to compete with the NLF on a purely political basis. But
the word puppet was never applied to this government by the mainstream
media any more than they would use the word aggression to describe
their own government’s role.
Things have not improved since the Vietnam War years. The United
States fought then to maintain a client government and dependency
in the southern part of Vietnam. The Bush administration aimed similarly
to depose Saddam Hussein and put in his place a client government
and dependency in Iraq. Of course we sponsored elections in Iraq
and gave Iraq its “sovereignty” in 2004, but we sponsored
elections in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, and “South Vietnam”
had been declared sovereign by its U.S. sponsor in 1954, and anybody
capable of making an independent assessment would have been aware
that the sovereignty was purely nominal. Also that the elections
were “demonstration elections” designed to prove something
to the U.S. public rather than free elections that gave the locals
a real choice. Iraq’s election was held under a military occupation
and in the midst of a counterinsurgency war that was provoking a
simultaneous civil war so that, like the Vietnam elections, it was
compromised in advance.
George Bush himself pointed out the incompatibility of a military
occupation with an honest election. With reference to Lebanon, Bush
stated that France as well as the United States, “said loud
and clear to Syria, you get your troops and your secret services
out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish.”
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has been far more extensive, intrusive,
transformational, and violent than that of Syria in Lebanon, but
the patriotic double standard applies here and is unchallenged in
the U.S. mainstream. Our troops, secret services, control of finances,
and imposed structural and legal changes in the occupied country
do not threaten “good democracy.” This is strictly a triumph
of ideology and statesupportive propaganda.
T
he
ease with which the democracy objective has been institutionalized
as the Bush goal in Iraq is truly striking. My favorite illustration
is Michael Ignatieff’s lengthy article “Who Are Americans
To Think That Freedom is Theirs To Spread?” in the
New
York Times Magazine
of June 26, 2005. In this article, Ignatieff
lauds Bush for putting his presidency on the line in the interest
of liberation/democracy (“risked his presidency on the premise
that Jefferson might be right”). Ignatieff is on target in
saying that Bush risked his presidency in his invasion and subsequent
lengthy pursuit of some kind of victory in Iraq, but it is obvious
that he did this for reasons other than democracy promotion—such
as power projection, control of oil, helping Israel, the pleasure
of beating up a virtually disarmed state. Furthermore, after getting
into the quagmire, Bush may have really put his presidency on the
line because of a vain, weak incompetent’s unwillingness to
admit a mistake and accept a defeat.
How
does Ignatieff know that Bush’s motive was simply the love
of democracy? He does not present one fact or argument in support
of the alleged democracy objective beyond Bush’s proclamation
that this is so. There is admittedly a “gap between his words
and…performance” and “the democratic turn in American
foreign policy has been recent.” No structural or any other
analysis with content is offered to supplement Bush’s word,
but Ignatieff is convinced. This is news analysis worthy of
Pravda
at its worst, but it is put forward in the
New York Times
,
and by a person who had been selected by the editors as a magazine
“regular” and frequent contributor to the opinion page
(Ignatieff’s byline has appeared in the
New York Times
33 times since 1988, including 9 book reviews, 6 op-ed columns,
and 18 magazine articles, according to a Nexus database search).
Another important liberal spokesperson for the notion that Bush
was pursuing democracy has been George Packer, who like Ignatieff
writes often for the
New York Times
, is a regular in the
New Yorker
and published a book on Iraq policy in 2005,
The
Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq
. Like Ignatieff, Packer
rests his case exclusively on Bush’s word: “No one should
doubt that he and his surviving senior advisers believe in what
they call the ‘forward strategy of freedom,’ even if they’ve
had to talk themselves into it…. Bush wants democratization
to be his legacy. So when his critics, here and abroad, claim that
his rhetoric merely provides cynical cover for an American power
grab, they misjudge his sincerity and tend to sound like defenders
of the status quo” (
New Yorker
, January 7, 2005). Given
that he doesn’t offer an iota of evidence for this claim or
tell us how he measures “sincerity” or stop to analyze
what Bush might mean by “democracy” and what kind might
satisfy his new dedication, Packer tends to sound like a gullible
apologist and willing executioner for “an American power grab.”
Like Ignatieff, Packer doesn’t discuss any structural factors
or anything else affecting U.S. foreign policy and he is even more
obscurantist that Ignatieff, who at least mentions that historically
the United States has often supported tyrannies and that the turn
to “democracy promotion” has been recent—Packer ignores
both the power structure and history. He repeatedly asserts that
this is a “war of ideas,” with freedom versus tyranny
the issue, again without the slightest attempt to examine whether
material interests might be the driving force with ideas providing
the cover. He never tries to explain why the war of ideas doesn’t
extend to policy toward Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan, and Israel, and why with ideas so decisive these countries
can be exempted from democracy promotion, while “democracy”
is aggressively promoted in Iraq and the Ukraine. It’s odd
that Bush should literally invade Iraq and threaten to invade Iran
to “promote democracy,” but in cases like Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, and Egypt not only doesn’t he invade, but he actually
provides economic aid and/or military protection to undemocratic
regimes.
There is also the question of reconciliation of democracy promotion
abroad with Bush’s steady erosion of democracy at home. In
his book
The Fight Is For
Democracy
Packer acknowledges
that under increasing business domination and pressure democracy
is “atrophying” in the United States itself, but he fails
to address the problem of consistency and the challenge this atrophying
poses to the sincere and passionate desire of Bush to promote democracy
abroad. Could his desired legacy be democracy abroad and authoritarianism
at home?
As regards Iraq, what if the Iraqi people reject us and, in fact,
want us out badly enough to develop a formidable resistance to the
occupation? Packer never addresses this question directly, but the
whole tone of his work suggests that it is acceptable to impose
a regime on a country by violence if it has a dictatorial government.
At one point Packer implies that the idea of “America’s
divine right of intervention” is a “bad idea” (“Wars
and Ideas,”
New Yorker
, July 5, 2004), but in reference
to Iraq Packer swallows that divine right, given the badness of
the Saddam regime. The blatant violation of international law and
implicit abandonment of the rule of law doesn’t disturb him,
given the provocations and his implicit faith in U.S. motives—and
that divine right can apparently be rationalized no matter what
the consequences. Any difficulties are a product of an unfortunate
mismanagement and perhaps an unappreciative and recalcitrant population.
So
if there is compelling evidence that the Iraqi people don’t
want us, for reasons of mismanagement or because of their belief
that, contrary to Packer, the Bush team is not there to create a
real democracy, that is tough luck for the Iraqis—we must stay
because “we are committed to this and we have an enormous obligation
to the Iraqis” (quoted by Michelle Goldberg, “Dazed and
Confused About Iraq,”
Salon
, October 27, 2003).
In carrying out this crusade for those Iraqis, we have been responsible
for the death of several hundred thousand civilians, and deaths
have grown in close relation to the character and scale of U.S.
intervention. Is it not cynical—or stupid—apologetics
to demand more self-generating violence allegedly on behalf of the
victims? What kind of hypocrite could prate regularly about “genocide”
in Bosnia— which Packer refers to repeatedly—where perhaps
100,000 were killed on all sides while asking for still more violence
on the part of his own government in Iraq where the civilian total
has already greatly exceeded the “genocidal” total in
Bosnia?
For Packer, “The hard question isn’t whether America should
try to enlarge the democratic order but how.” The role of critics
of Bush should be “not to scoff at the idea of spreading freedom
but to take it seriously—to hold him to his own talk.”
In short, with Packer we are dealing not with a “cynical”
apologetics for a power grab, but with a muddled apologetics that
can’t get its lines straight and can’t face up to serious
political or historical analysis and evidence. Again, that the
New
York Times
and
New Yorker
can swallow such tripe tells
us a lot about the political culture (Packer has had 30 bylined
items in the
New York Times
, 26 in the
New Yorker
).
Ignatieff and Packer are surely not alone. The notion that democracy
is the Bush objective in Iraq pervades the
New York Times
and mainstream media in general, although for the most part it is
just taken as a premise, without the padding, windbaggery, contradictions,
and evasions that make Ignatieff’s and Packer’s treatment
of the issue look so foolish. Of course, the right wing takes the
democracy objective as obvious. Robert Kagan even puts it sarcastically—“America
support democracy, how novel” (
Financial Times
, December
6, 2006)—and Andrew Sullivan states that the neoconservatives
“fought a war to construct a democratic polity in Iraq”
(
Sunday Times
[London], July 23, 2006). It is standard procedure
across the board: Stanley Hoffmann speaks of civilian leaders in
the Pentagon with “hopes for building a democracy in Iraq that
would somehow serve as a model for other governments in the Middle
East” (“Out of Iraq,”
New York Review of Books
,
October 21, 2004) and Orlando Patterson writes a long commentary
piece in the
New York Times
to show “the folly of forcing
freedom on those who don’t want it” (“God’s
Gift?” December 19, 2006), with no attempt whatsoever to show
that the forcing of “freedom” was a real objective or
that those benighted Iraqis wouldn’t want it if it was really
an offer.
Of course Thomas Friedman swallows this as a premise, finding that
“the post-9/11 democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world
is being hijacked” (“The Kidnapping of Democracy,”
NYT
, July 14, 2006), and the
Times
editors
regularly invoke the democracy objective: “Washington”
is always aiming “to build a peaceful, democratic and unified
Iraq that could survive without American troops” (ed., “The
Road Ahead in Iraq,” October 26, 2006), and
Times
reporters
regularly accept that Iraq has a “functioning democracy”
and a “democratically elected government” that is threatened
and may not survive (Michael Wines, “Democracy Has to Start
Somewhere,”
NYT
, February 6, 2005; Michael
Gordon, “Bombs Aimed at G.I.’s in Iraq Are Increasing,”
NYT
,
August 16, 2006). But throughout
the media there is that “push for democracy” (Paul Richter,
“Mideast Allies near a state of panic,”
Los Angeles
Times
, December 3, 2006); that “high-profile push for democracy”
(David Morgan, “U.S. seen retreating from democracy push,”
Reuters, October 12, 2006).
This
premise is attached to what passes for criticism (as with Hoffmann
and Patterson) and mainstream editorialists and writers take the
democracy objective as an established truth and criticize Bush only
for mismanaging the occupation. Not for the invasion itself, as
an illegal act of aggression, but only for messing up afterwards.
Thus on two of the three main issues, the
Times
and media
in general flunk the test of substantive objectivity. For a U.S.
target, an act of aggression will be called aggression and will
be condemned as immoral and illegal, but not the U.S. attack on
Iraq. While the
Times
and U.S. media in general would never
allow a target country’s claim of a purely benevolent objective
in a cross-border attack to be taken at face value, they do that
with Bush’s claim, in the Ignatieff and Packer mode—their
leader says it, therefore it must be true.
Edward
S. Herman is an economist, media critic, and author of numerous
articles and books, including
Triumph of the Market
(South
End Press).
