Brooks takes down another strawman

The power and majesty of David Brooks's logic fells all strawmen who dare come before it.

I mention this case study [El Salvador] because we are approaching election day in Afghanistan on Oct. 9. Six days later, voter registration begins in Iraq. Conditions in both places will be tense and chaotic. And in Washington, a mood of bogus tough-mindedness has swept the political class. As William Raspberry wrote yesterday in The Washington Post, "the new consensus seems to be that bringing American-style democracy to Iraq is no longer an achievable goal." We should just settle for what John Kerry calls "stability." We should be satisfied if some strongman comes in who can restore order.

The people who make this argument pat themselves on the back for being hard-headed, but the fact is they are naïve. They've got things exactly backward. The reason we should work for full democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just because it's noble, but because it's practical. It is easier to defeat an insurgency and restore order with elections than without.

I don't recall John Kerry saying we should "settle" for "stability." I know of no one who seriously wants to give up and stick another dictator on the throne in Iraq, with the possible exception of Bush, Cheney, and Bremer who appointed a thug with CIA ties as the "strongman" in the run-up to elections. And it was Bremer, after all, who decided that, appearances be damned, he would run the CPA from Hussein's palace; in effect, sitting on the throne there.

And, tellingly, Brooks names no names in decrying the foes of an election in Afghanistan.

What Brooks fails to do, with his morally superior tone and his panglossian world view, is to note that it is not democracy that we question, it is how to achieve it.

In Afghanistan, security outside of Kabul is tenuous at best, and the Taliban are resurgent. There are not nearly enough election monitors, and it is feared that the elections will be rigged by tribal chiefs and that women will be excluded.

In Iraq, Rumsfeld has already ceded several Sunni areas, in effect accepting that the election will be a vehicle for Shiite dominance. Those wanting to vote will be dodging, not "sniper fire," but suicide bombings.

Regarding El Salvador, I think his history is a little, shall we say, compressed, but I'm no expert on the politics of South America in the 1980s. But I will say that El Salvador lacked a few things that Iraq can boast of: 1.) A despised occupying force; 2.) three distinct ethnic groups vying for power, with one, the Sunnis, losing their long hold on power; and 3.) rising religious fundamentalism with all its inherent horrors.

No, it's not elections we fear in Iraq, it's failed elections we fear in Iraq.

And to think that all the chaos and terror swirling around Iraq right now was predicted.

The same intelligence unit that produced a gloomy report in July about the prospect of growing instability in Iraq warned the Bush administration about the potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion two months before the war began, government officials said Monday.

The estimate came in two classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council, an independent group that advises the director of central intelligence. The assessments predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict.

One of the reports also warned of a possible insurgency against the new Iraqi government or American-led forces, saying that rogue elements from Saddam Hussein's government could work with existing terrorist groups or act independently to wage guerrilla warfare, the officials said. The assessments also said a war would increase sympathy across the Islamic world for some terrorist objectives, at least in the short run, the officials said.

That's the kind of hard-headed realism that Brooks now calls "naive."