Salon has an excellent
presentation of a speech given to foreign policy professionals. It's very succinct, and it touches on anti-Americanism, the European reaction to American politics, and the fate of democratization efforts. I've pasted some excerpts below. I apologize for the length in advance, but I think this is something every Kossack should read.
Neither in Europe nor in the Middle East is anti-Americanism simply a product of the Iraq war. Anyone in touch with foreign colleagues who have recently visited the U.S. has certainly been regaled with stories of the many petty humiliations associated with our newly tightened and irrationally vexing visa regime. But the Iraq war has certainly had a massive impact, and not only on U.S. credibility abroad. What we face here is not merely skepticism but also burning rage, a passionate antipathy that, although far from uniform, does seem ubiquitous. Even now, however, America's critics continue to distinguish between the U.S. administration, which they fear and despise, and the American people, with whom they feel sympathy.
But the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison may have finally changed that. If the American electorate, knowing what it knows and, above all, having seen what it has seen, proceeds to reelect George W. Bush in November, the moderating distinction between the American administration and the American people will be eroded or perhaps erased -- with what violent consequences no one can predict.
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But the unintelligibility of Bush's formulation runs much deeper. Roughly speaking, "democracy" is a system that allows those who are directly affected by decisions to exert some influence on the decision makers, ideally by periodically reelecting them or ousting them from office. This simple definition makes clear why Europeans and others greet Bush's endless claims to be "spreading democracy" with such disbelief. Throughout the world, people who were never consulted, even casually, are profoundly affected every day by decisions made in Washington. America's blankness about the downstream effects on other countries of its actions is without question one of the principal sources of anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere.
Formulated differently, anti-Americanism is to some extent the expression of thwarted democratic aspirations. This also explains, incidentally, why many Europeans hostile to the U.S. seem to place such unrealistically high hopes on the United Nations and other multilateral bodies. It is obviously impossible to run the world through an organization as dysfunctional as the U.N. But even sophisticated non-Americans who understand the real limits of multilateralism and international law continue to look hopefully to the U.N. They do so, against the odds, because the U.N. represents one of the few possibilities left on the horizon to pressure the U.S. into taking into account non-American interests and points of view.
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In the end, after receiving a few concessions, the major European powers will no doubt agree to help the U.S. win what U.N. resolutions it needs concerning Iraq. They may also contribute more cash and troops to the international effort in Afghanistan. But, aside from the U.K., they will give the U.S. none of the substantial help it needs in Iraq. They would presumably be willing to contribute to a U.N. and NATO operation, so long as the U.S. reduced its visibility and relinquished command and control. But short of such a dramatic volte-face by Bush, the Europeans are not about to ride to the rescue.
So here we can register a genuine and serious injury to U.S. national security that is directly traceable to popular anti-Americanism. It is largely a self-inflicted wound, the result of the Bush administration's contemptuous treatment of America's European allies. The damage will become even more galling if it turns out, during the next months, that very few non-European countries are willing to maintain their contingents or send more soldiers to Iraq even if the U.S. pays the freight.
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Terrorism is by nature unpredictable. But European-American relations will also be transformed to some extent by a perfectly predictable event, the American presidential election. So I should mention the almost messianic hopes that America's traditional friends in Europe are now investing in John Kerry. This remarkable faith suggests, first of all, that residual pro-American feelings exist just beneath the surface in Europe, even though no one can imagine a repair in U.S.-European relations if Bush stays in office, this time released from the first-termer's need to mollify his electorate. The hopes that political elites in Europe place in Kerry are easy to explain psychologically. Politically serious Europeans recognize that there are no effective solutions to many of the world's greatest problems without American support and leadership.
Some European commentators have said that there are few doctrinal differences, in foreign policy, between Kerry and Bush. But they quickly add that removing Bush from office in November will still make a decisive difference to international security, including the global struggle against terrorism. The need to correct grievous errors alone speaks for the importance of putting a new foreign policy team into the White House, a group that has no incentive to conceal embarrassing blunders or to continue failed policies.
But other European commentators go further, expecting Kerry to rebuild the Atlantic alliance on a wholly new basis. Bush acceded to the presidency, they say, with the conviction that the collapse of the USSR combined with America's military superiority made the Atlantic alliance essentially otiose. Europeans did not see Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat. But America didn't care because it could invade Iraq with or without the help of its former allies.
Kerry, according to his European admirers, should do everything in his power to avoid this slide into gratuitous unilateralism. His first step, they say, should be to soberly examine the principal post-Cold War threats to U.S. national security -- WMD proliferation and non-state terrorist networks plotting mass-casualty attacks on U.S. cities. The national security establishments of our primary European allies say that these are the main threats to European security, too. The perception of shared threats, in fact, provides the obvious starting point for a post-Bush foreign policy. Kerry will easily grasp this point.
Both menaced by terrorism and proliferation, Europeans and Americans can greatly benefit by security cooperation. Moreover, Europe has a great deal to offer to the U.S. Europe is a military pygmy and can therefore provide little help in invading countries such as Iraq. But it is not a security pygmy -- not if we take seriously the way security has been redefined since 9/11. National security has now become largely a matter of effective counterterrorism, for which military force is of only limited value. When it comes to counterterrorism, the Europeans are quite well endowed. For historical and geographical reasons, Europe's clandestine security agencies have even greater capacities than the CIA and the FBI for infiltrating and monitoring anti-American terrorist groups. The most robust and flourishing form of multilateralism today, in fact, may be international police cooperation. The Atlantic alliance could fairly rapidly be renewed and deepened on the basis of a shared understanding of common threats and the capacity for mutual assistance -- a task that America's friends in Europe expect that a President Kerry would energetically take up.
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Besides facilitating terrorist recruitment, the Iraq war is also likely to dampen the prospects for democratic reform in the region. Before examining the political repercussions of the Iraq war within Middle Eastern states, however, it is necessary to focus on three probable developments on the U.S. side.
First, in the wake of the Iraq debacle, Washington is likely to succumb, at least temporarily, to democracy-promotion fatigue. The sting of failure will presumably dampen for a time serious interest in supporting democratic reforms in the region. Grandiose talk will continue, of course. But less money will be spent, and less experienced personnel will be assigned to a project that now appears much less realistic than before.
Second, America's aggressive counterterrorism efforts have already interfered significantly with its attempts at democracy promotion. To battle terrorism, the U.S. has been lending support to the secretive and coercive apparatuses of states that are, at best, incompletely democratic. This trend will continue and, under these conditions, democratization efforts will no doubt be funded quite feebly and will be cosmetic at best.
Third, it seems to be dawning on the administration that democratization elsewhere in the world might not have the same happily pro-American consequences as democratization had in Eastern Europe. Polish democracy is pro-American because the majority of Poles have strong historical reasons for identifying with America. The same cannot be said for a majority of Iraqis. As a result, Iraqi democracy, even if we had been able to create it, probably would have been virulently anti-American and most certainly anti-Israeli. As the example of Turkey reveals, democratically elected Muslim regimes can persuasively invoke and even rally public opinion when saying "no" to urgent American pleas for cooperation. Appreciation for this dynamic will also presumably moderate Washington's appetite for democracy promotion in the Middle East.
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A worst-case outcome would be a quisling regime clinging to shreds of "sovereign" power after the departure of U.S. troops, first weakened by successive ministerial assassinations and then fragmenting along ethnic or sectarian lines, and eventually collapsing. Following that could be large-scale communal violence, including another murderous onslaught on the Kurds, who are viewed by Iraqi Arabs, both Shiite and Sunni, as collaborators with the American occupation. We might even live to see a dramatic last-minute evacuation by helicopter of a besieged U.S. Embassy.
But let's leave such nightmare scenarios aside. What is the very best outcome that we can hope for in Iraq? With extraordinary luck, Iraq could become, in a few years, something like Bosnia without the high representative of the E.U. It would have a weak central government because, given the fragmentation of the society, no all-Iraqi government can be simultaneously representative and coherent. Periodic elections would serve only to reinforce the independence of the Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions, and the government would constantly be in delicate negotiations with local and tribal leaders. Such a pseudo-state would be considered successful if it could protect its cabinet members from assassination, if most foreign fighters were evicted (breaking the lethal marriage of convenience between transnational terrorists and nationalist insurgents) and if neighboring powers were not driven to dispatch military forces into the country. But it would be at best a corrupt, criminalized and disorganized polity, festering, unsafe and characterized by violent weakness.
How would such an outcome affect the reputation of American-sponsored democratization in the region? For a clue we can look to Russia. In the early 1990s, Russians associated the word "reform" with hope for social improvement. Today, the word has been completely discredited by its association with unjustifiable inequalities and the corrupt seizure of public property by well-placed insiders wholly unconcerned with the well-being of ordinary citizens. Something analogous has happened to the word "democracy," which has become associated with Russia's humiliating collapse from superpower to basket case. Will the Iraq debacle contaminate the concept of democracy for Middle Easterners in a similar way?