What is wrong with our Iraq policies?
The basic message is, don't blame the Iraqis for the failure of the Bush government.
Blame the fact that Bush does not believe in democracy, and does not understand it. Nor do any of his senior advisers.
The standard script for most of those opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq - and I am one - is that the goal of imposing democracy and the end of the barrel of a gun is a false one. This is true. They then go on to say that one reason this goal is impossible to achieve is that the Iraqi people are unprepared for democracy and incapable of achieving the creation of a democratic state on their own.
This is racist nonsense. It is of a piece with the standard - and self-contradictory line that no people can become democratic until they are "ready." How people are to become "ready for democracy" without actually establishing democracy and trying to make it work is beyond me. As is the idea that the people of India, Japan, or the United States were somehow "ready" for democracy before they were able to become democratic states. The United States has been a democracy for two hundred and thirty years, and - as proven by the clowns we've put in charge of the place - we haven't got it right, yet, ourselves.
What went wrong with the project to democratize Iraq, and then extend this democratization to the rest of the Middle East, is simple. The people who implemented and carried out this project - one may call them neo-conservatives if one wishes - haven't got a clue as to what a democratic government actually is.
A successful democratic state is not a pure democracy. It is - and here comes the most dreaded word in American political rhetoric - a liberal democracy. The difference is that in a liberal democracy, mechanisms such as respect for the rule of law and human rights, balances of power between branches of government and levels of government (federalism), and independent judiciaries and journalists limit the scope and power of majority rule. This was the genius of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that the so-called conservatives ignore and abuse every day they are in power.
Bush and his advisers and minions (one can truly use that word to describe them) do not understand what democracy is. They have no concept of democracy as the rest of the world conceives of the term. They have their muddled ideological image, which mainly results in the idea that true democracy is everyone doing as they (Republicans) tell them to. Actual respect for democracy and the structure of our Constitution and government are beyond them.
And so we had the hopeless failures of the CPA and the other attempts at running Iraq. The looting was permitted because they actually believed that, given freedom, the people of Iraq would just naturally adopt the ideas of Ayn Rand and automatically establish a libertarian paradise. Vast sums of money and effort were wasted on pie-in-the-sky projects to create ideal educational, monetary, investment, and security institutions from nothing. And the few ideas which would actually be both consistent with their ideology and workable in the post-invasion environment - privatizing the oil sector of the economy, and developing a system of democratic representation which did not depend on tribal identity and therefore lock in the power of an already established, ossified leadership - were not just ignored, but never even considered.
You can't point a gun at someone and tell them to make a free choice or you'll shoot them. You can't promote a set of beliefs that you don't accept yourself. Far from being a force to spread democracy into the Middle East and the world, the Bush cabal has been a force to remove democracy from our own country.
Results matter. Intensions not so much. The result of the Bush policies has been not only to increase the numbers of, legitimize, and strengthen the believers in radical Islam who want to kill Americans and destroy our economic, military, and political power. The result of the Bush policies has been to attack and seek to destroy our economic, military, and political power themselves. Terrorists we can handle. God save our way of life from our own leadership.