IRAQI EXCEPTIONALISM

The NY Times has a fascinating piece on the cross-currents of thought that will influence the shape of post-war Iraq. If you're looking for a quick primer on the Bush administration's ideas, this article provides it:

The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad.

I can't find anything to argue with in there. In fact, I've said the same thing myself. In the context of shifting our foreign bases from Europe to post-war Iraq...

But the Middle East will change too, and for the better. The early going will be very difficult: Our troops and cultural influences will be very unpopular at first, but as we maintain contact and keep the local dictators to heel, we're likely to become more popular. If one or two Middle Eastern states flirt with real democracy, there's a chance that they all will, and the Middle East might come to resemble eastern Asian states like South Korea and Japan--not exactly Milton Friedman-style capitalism, but not hard-core socialist either. Either way, they will be better than they are now, and less likely to fund our enemies.

I was probably wrong about one thing, though. I no longer think that our troops, whether occupying Iraq or assisting its new democratic government, will be unpopular from the start. Sure, there will be small-scale terrorism against them. But that's true wherever they're stationed around the world--from Kuwait to Japan to South Korea to Germany and even Britian, our overseas forces have always generated some local backlash and small-scale terrorism (sheesh--even here at home). But the vast majority of the people in all those countries and the countless others we've helped toward democracy support our presence. The same will likely happen in a liberated Iraq.

Iraq is the low-hanging fruit in the war against terrorism, for the simple facts that a) it's a nexus of anti-Americanism; b) it's unquestionably a WMD-creating rogue state; c) there's a pile of international law already on the books justifying regime change there; and d) it's in the heart of Arabia, and therefore ideal as a test-market and example of Arabian democracy. That we're having such difficulty mustering international will to destroy Saddam's regime and replace it with something better testifies to one simple fact: The rest of the world didn't suffer 9-11, and therefore has yet to clue in to the true danger that civilization faces. They won't get it until it happens to them, on their soil. Ironically our war against Iraq, opposed by much of the world, will probably prevent such atrocities in other countries, which means that they'll likely never understand the threat the way we do. They'll harbor a grudge because we saved them, without ever knowing how much good we have actually done. But I'd still prefer that to witnessing further terrorist atrocity, in the US or elsewhere.

UPDATE: I should probably clarify at least one point in this post, which is why much of the world opposes us. There are several reasons, ranging from a distrust of whoever is currently the most powerful state around, to opposition to all liberal democratic ideals (on the part of tyrants like Saddam, mostly, ruling in places like Havana and Beijing), to a resurgence in Communism and its efforts to fund and promote anything that weakens us. Further, some hard core socialist types around the world simply hold an unshakable paradigm that anything the US does is bad and must be opposed, that anything the US does is bound to fail or make things worse and should be opposed, and that the US never works for its stated aims but always has a sinister ulterior motive and therefore should be opposed. We won't convince these people no matter what we do and no matter how successful our actions are. But I think these reasons rise from a minority of the opposition to America's war actions. I really do think that most people who oppose us just don't understand the threat because 9-11 didn't happen to them--or hasn't yet.

UPDATE AGAIN: Maybe those paradigms aren't so unshakable. Unfortunately for today's peaceniks, we can't wait 30 years for them to figure things out for themselves.