When the clouds of dust arose on the horizon announcing the approach of Genghis Khan's armies, it was too late. Hoards of keshiks would descend on the city and demand fealty or death. One submitted or the city was levelled. Either way, the city fell, the hoards took what they wanted, and they rode on. Khan's armies struck quickly and dealt severely with opponents. "I am the wrath of God," claimed Khan. His sense of victimhood had turned to one of entitlement.
In a few decades he built one of the largest empires known to man. It stretched from the frozen Siberian tundra as far south as Cambodia. It stretched from the Korean peninsula as far west as Austria. His army was beseiging Vienna when they heard of his death.
Khan's sons split his empire. And with their own deaths the empire fell into constituent parts that were pretty much as they had been before his martial successes. Khan's achievements when measured in military terms are mind-boggling. But how did his legacy stack up? Perhaps the British used some of Khan's many and marvelous administrative techniques of using local rulers to administer local areas. Perhaps Moghul emperors ruled the brutal middle Asian steppes north of India for some time. Perhaps Khan's descendents were among the several invaders of the Chinese who arrived ruled, and were transformed by the people they ruled.
One side-effect that changed Europe was that, for a short time, it was safe to travel from Europe to China by land. Marco Polo did it. And his stories stimulated an emerging Europe to trade with the Chinese. But that is another story. So, too, is the idea that Khan's invaders themselves or trade that was spawned as a result brought the plague to Europe.
If one thinks of Khan's achievements in terms of statecraft, Khan's military achievement amounted to nothing. There was no permanent state. There was no new identifiable people. There was no unique culture. There were no powerfully transformative ideas. Perhaps a good historian would be able to find ways in which Khan's invasions overthrew a local regime that led to some permanent local change. And perhaps his action catalyzed other changes - ones that would have happened anyway but at a different time.
Khan's monumental failure was a failure to understand the importance of permanent institutions. It was Khan's personal relationships that maintained the shape of the empire. He had defined these completely. And once he was gone, there simply could be no replacement: nobody had the same relationships. Khan's failure was a failure of institutions. It was probably his complete inability to think in terms of permanent institutions that allowed his success. But it was certainly his inability to think in terms of institutions that was to prove the downfall of his empire. Khan's failure to establish institutions that properly defined the flow of power doomed his empire completely. It could not succeed.
Jefferson, by contrast, started with the idea that government was an institution. And that the institution of government had a particular relationship to the people it governed. He did two things. He established an institutional form of government that inherently kept government from being about a single person. All personal ambition was kept in check by it. And he created a body of philosophical work that simultaneously appealed to the governed and informed all of the noble goals of his effort.
The Constitution provided for a voluntary means by which states migh join the Union. This gave legitimacy of the Federal government, initially, derived from the legitimacy of existing democratic institutions, state governments, just as it did from popular support. Thus the government of the US was an institutional manifestation of a contract envisioned first by Rousseau. The idea proved transformative in the US. And its precepts were echoed throughout western Europe and in many other nations, too.
Some central ideas were: rule of law, balance of power, political involvement by the governed legitimizes government. There are several more. But the idea is that the simultaneous permanence and flexibility of the institution would withstand onslaughts of the ambitious and serve the public good in perpetuity.
Jefferson and his cohorts Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Jay and a few others established a body of thought in support of their ideas. Previous democracies had devolved into tyrannies and men such as Franklin were skeptical that their ideas would endure far into the future. Still, they imagined that if America had a rich institutional life the cult of personality would not lead to the collapse of the fragile institution of a democratic republic that they fashioned.
To that end they gave us mandatory public education. A person who is incapable of reading Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Blackstone, and the founding fathers is incapable self-government. It is not true that being able to read the works of those men would necessarily make us individually wise as they were. But if enough of us were to understand their ideas it might make us jointly wise. So long as we remain both moderately critical and open to new ideas; so long as we listen to each other and work to arrive at good policies, democracy has a hope of enduring. That was their belief.
Democratic institutions are fragile. But at least they are a bit more durable than what was left behind by Genghis Khan.
There are institutions that fall somewhere in between. Organized crime cartels, for instance, might be thought of as associative institutions. They cooperate, have informal governing bodies, and so on. Their cooperation arises from an evolved code of conduct - a kind of honor among thieves. These kinds of organizations thrive when goods become contraband. Narcotics, for instance. And arms. They prove indestructible so long as there are laws limiting the flow of any goods. Just like the game Whack a Mole, the suppression of one group necessarily causes another to emerge. In any case, organized crime syndicates operate associatively, with the management of relationships being central to success. The lower levels of the organization may be heirarchical, but at the highest levels they can be relatively "clubby." But there is a brutality of purpose to all of them; to exploit weaknesses.
...
Reckoning the role of institutions in stable society is one that would have been central in planning for the aftermath of an invasion in Iraq. If one had studied Iraq for, say, twelve or fifteen hours before the decision was made to invade, one would have been struck by the realization that there were essentially two or three large, functioning institutions with broad support through Iraq. One was the Baath party which controlled every aspect governmental power throughout the nation. If there was a governmental function, the Baath party had some role in regulating it. Another institution would definitely be the Shia religious organization. Among the faithful, no single entity had more influence. It plays a huge role in the social life of its members.
One might identify factions within these groups. And one might identify other sundry local and regional groups with extensive local or regional power. The Kurds, for instance. But pretty much every function that occurred state-wide was controlled by the Baathists. This would have included police work. But it would have included everything else from hospitals and schools to banks. Only the smallest proprietorships could be considered too small to be part of the apparatus. This is the nature of totalitarian rule.
The debaathification efforts that followed close upon the heels of invasion dismantled the only secular institution capable of ruling Iraq. Ostensibly, the purpose was to dismantle the totalitarian state to prevent a recurrence of the Sadam phenomenon. But it was so profound that also eliminated all hope of replacing it with something fundamentally different. The elections formalized the problem; parties led by religious leaders won large chunks of the seats in the the legislature.
My own prediction before "shock and awe" was that if the operation succeeded in changing the nature of the state there were two intermediate term possibilities. One was that the place would devolve into chaos and anarchy. And the only solution to this kind of complete failure is .. totalitarian rule. So long as people do not voluntarily behave, if one is to acheive order, one must use force.
The more hopeful alternative was that Iraq would become a religious state a la Iran, ruled by democratically elected officials and under the strong influence of Shia law. The possibilites for outcomes were bounded by the nature of the local institutions.
The idea that one cannot "impose" democracy on a group of people is one that every reasonably educated person has been exposed to. My own formal study of history ended in 8th grade. All high school courses were taught by sports coaches and amounted to nothing. I took no college history or political science courses. And my only philosophy course was a simple introduction to philosophy. I don't have any idea how I know it: but it is one of a handful of precepts about democracy that one has to know. Montesquieu wrote about it. Virtuous people, he claimed, would elect virtuous leaders. Scoundrels would elect scoundrels. In democracy, one gets what one asks for.
By contrast, the neocons who got us into this mess studied at the University of Chicago under Strauss, Bloom, and Wohlstetter - many of them. They were PhD candidates in areas of study such as History, Political Philosophy, Economics, and Political Science. So it is not conceivable that the people who decided to dismantle Iraq's only secular institution could have failed to realize that it would necessarily mean that the nation would devolve into anarchy and chaos. Nor could it have been lost on them that taking absolute power away from a powerful, well-connected, and highly educated minority would definitely not be as easy as giving chocolate to a child. The Sunni would fight back. Iraq would descend into anarchy if the single nation-wide stabilizing institution were dissolved and there was no effective effort to replace it. Guys with guns were necessary. But they were not enough. A functional nationwide political system had to be in place and functioning. Conspicuously, Americans provided neither.
Failure both to anticipate the problem and to react to it early on exacerbated to the violence. This cannot be ascribed to executional error. It is a planning problem. Either the neocons are dumber than the class idiot - blind drunk; or they set out to create a destablized Iraq in order to achieve some other end.
Discover what that end is, and all of the ills of the Bush administration ascribed to incompetency can be more convincingly ascribed to some more occult plan. One that makes perfect sense if one believes in the possibility of associative institutions in the spirit of Ghengis Khan's. Does "The wrath of God" approach? Or is it just another seasonal dust storm?