Transplanting the heart of democracy in Iraq

Héctor Abad Faciolince explains why Bush's declared attempt to introduce democracy in Iraq by force seems set to fail

A striking story is told about King Jaled of Saudi Arabia, a US Middle Eastern ally and potentate who was accustomed to travelling in his private 747 jet. It had a prayer room that was made to rotate gyroscopically so that it always faced Mecca. As the king suffered from heart trouble, the second floor of the Jumbo had been converted to an intensive care cardiac unit. But
that was not all: the king travelled with a live donor who was prepared to sacrifice himself at any moment for the love of his master. Eventually the king died from a sudden heart attack (there was no time to extract his servant's heart) in one of the bathrooms in his palace. This story, though apparently a legend, illustrates rather well the prevailing worldview in Arab monarchies, where the latest technology stands alongside mediaeval servilism and ideology. 

In such a world, to speak of democracy, religious freedom, women's rights or general elections would sound about as remote, unreal and absurd as a proposal for freedom of cult for the Spanish (including Jews and Muslims) would have sounded to Isabel the Catholic, or the idea of the plebs voting a new monarch every six years would have sounded to the Sun King. It is something that simply does not occur within such a worldview. 

If we accept that the United States invaded Iraq in order to depose a tyrant, combat terrorism and establish democracy in that corner of the world, then it must be said that the only
objective it has so far achieved is the first: Saddam Hussein is defeated and in hiding. As regards the second objective (combating terrorism), the effect has been precisely the opposite: military action has multiplied terrorism one hundredfold in that part of the world, seriously endangering its further diffusion throughout the whole region. And this is closely related to the third problem, namely the possibility of exporting and imposing a democratic system by foul means. 

Crushing military superiority is not enough to oblige a complete
change of custom and mentality. Artificially transplanting democracy produces – in those countries that have never become acclimatised to a free environment – an instinctive reaction of rejection. Christian and supposedly democratic
invading armies are immediately perceived by the inhabitants of these countries as an extraneous body. The explosive admixture of modernity, brute force and religion produces immediate repulsion. An external imposition of another model and another historical moment produces so great an imbalance and so radical a break with all the traditional equilibria (something that can only be obtained over centuries) that the result is chaos. Within this scenario the only winning military strategy would be the extermination of the opponent. But our present moral conscience does not admit genocide and so the result is very lengthy postwars with a costly intervention army held perpetually in check by hundreds of fanatic suicide cells. 

If we observe the history of the West, we see that democracy and liberalism were imposed very slowly, so slowly that that their imposition has not yet been completed even in Europe. To achieve a regime of individual freedoms requires an Age of Enlightenment, great men like Voltaire and Diderot, various revolutions and the heads of monarchs. Religious tolerance, the possibility of not believing in everything that is said in the Bible, was an intellectual conquest that was slow and painful. In the Islamic world it is not possible to doubt a single syllable of the Koran.

It is not by tanks, planes, soldiers and missiles that we can
spread those moral advances that have been achieved in the West. What can be transmitted is the virus of free enquiry, freedom of conscience and expression, general access to education and women's liberation. This does not require
sanguinary lightning invasions but rather slow and patient cultural penetration seasoned with commercial and technological allure.

Bush's hard line is producing the very contrary of this: a total discredit of the values the West claims to profess; radical mistrust of the the whole Islamic world; and worst of all an unprecedented boom increase of the very evil that Americans would like to exterminate. The world has been far less safe and far more scourged by terrorism since Bush resolved to invade Iraq. Just as Israel succeeded (with its uncompromising military methods) in unifying Palestine communists with their radical Islamic adversaries, so the United States has succeeded in
uniting Iraqi Baath nationalism with the most fanatic form of Muslim radicalism. In the attempt to modernise Iraq and Afghanistan by force, the United States has succeeded only in stirring a hornets' nest of Sunnites and Shiites, of Al-Qaeda and Hamas. The result – a generalised outbreak of terrorism – could not have been worse.

Note: This article was first published in English by JUST Response on November 21 2003. Héctor Abad Faciolince is a leading Colombian journalist, novelist and academic who resides in Medellín.

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