Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson on Peddling Democracy
After those weapons of mass destruction never appeared and Saddam's al-Qaeda connection proved but a figment of the overly vivid neocon (and Vice-Presidential) imagination, the Bush administration wheeled out the shiniest of American exports, democracy. It had worked for Ronald Reagan in Central America in the 1980s, why not in Iraq, too? Suddenly, actual democratic elections, which administration officials had headed off or tried to contain from the moment Baghdad fell, were de rigueur, the very essence of our mission in Iraq, the true reason that we Americans were placed on this Earth. Who even recalled (or now recalls) the tawdry history of the American occupation, of the way L. Paul Bremer, our hapless viceroy in Baghdad and his kleptomaniacal Coalition Provisional Authority, did everything in their power, including cancelling local elections, to ward off democracy or any significant expression of the popular will.
Here's how, back in 2005, Juan Cole described the administration's democratic urge for an electorate so restricted that it might have made Saudi Arabia look liberal:
Then, of course, Ayatollah Ali Sistani insisted; the Bush people caved; the Iraqis bravely turned out to vote in vast numbers; and those "purple fingers" proved just so useful on the American home front. Think of it as importing democracy. Unfortunately, the largely Shiite government elected proved awkward indeed and, via our ambassador in Baghdad, flights in by top officials, the power of the purse and the power of the gun, "pressure" has been constantly applied to restrain and thwart them. With Iraq now in chaos and seemingly at the edge of dismemberment, democracy restricted to Baghdad's Green Zone and once again anathema to the President's top officials, it seems the perfect moment to turn to the larger subject of exporting the American "model." Let Chalmers Johnson, author of The Sorrows of Empire and a man with a memory, make some sense of the subject. Tom
Exporting the American Model
Markets and DemocracyBy Chalmers Johnson
There is something absurd and inherently false about one country trying to impose its system of government or its economic institutions on another. Such an enterprise amounts to a dictionary definition of imperialism. When what's at issue is "democracy," you have the fallacy of using the end to justify the means (making war on those to be democratized), and in the process the leaders of the missionary country are invariably infected with the sins of hubris, racism, and arrogance.
We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another thirty to forty years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.
posted by Annamarie at
3:24 PM
1 comment(s):
It sounds like he's arguing to have let France be overrun by Germany. Given that Nazism rose out of Germany only 15 years later, I think that's a pretty radical stance to take. Granted the climate might not have been there for Hitler to come to power, but I think it would have been there enough.
Quite an alternate universe that would have been. Frankly I'm glad the States joined in 1917. Too bad they didn't in 1916 or sooner.
By
Saskboy, at
7:21 PM
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