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It is especially important to remind ourselves of what transpired both in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and with the invasion itself. There are war drums sounding from influential members of both parties, calling for the U.S. to overthrow yet another brutal dictator in the region, namely Bashar el-Assad. But I think we should consider the parallels between Hussein and Assad. They are, in a certain sense, mirror images of one another. Hussein was a secular Sunni, ruling an ethnically mixed country with a majority Shia population. Assad is a secular Shia ruling an ethnically mixed population the majority of which are Sunni. Both were brutal, and both kept sectarian conflict in check through brutal violence. I am increasingly convinced that in much of the Middle East, a brutal strongman who manages, with an iron fist, to keep a country functioning is about as good an option as one is likely to find.
Much as we, in the West, may think that Western-style democracies are self-evidently superior to Middle Eastern-style dictators, western-style democracy is not something that can be simply planted and be expected to thrive. Western-style democracy grew out of the West's particular history, its particular religious and class struggles, and its own cultural, artistic, literary and philosophical milieu, which together provide the necessary underpinnings for democratic institutions. The notion that it can be "planted" in a region where the foundations that gave rise to it simply don't exist, and never have, is and always has been a preposterous one.
(Although, i also think the neoconservatives in this country who promote the ideal of "planting" democracy know, and knew back in 2003 and earlier when they began publishing papers on the topic, that it was really just a bit of noble-sounding rhetoric to be used as a sales pitch to sell the American public on their next money-making venture. I mean, it's not like they can simply sell a war based on the truth of the matter, which is that they wish to use some of America's sons and daughters as cannon fodder in order to make themselves exponentially richer than they already are. So instead they use a strategy of alternatively scaring us to death ("But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"
, and bombarding us with grandiloquent rhetoric (we're going to "liberate the people of Iraq," or we're going to "plant democracy in the Middle East" , designed to delude us into believing there is some great moral cause at stake.)
