Tom Engelhardt: The United States of Fear

This is why, using imagery that might have come out of the mouths of nineteenth-century colonialists, American officials long talked patronizingly about teaching the Iraqi “child” to pedal the “bike” of democracy (with us, as global parents, holding onto the bike’s seat). This is the context within which even a president wondered when to take off “the training wheels.” This is evidently why, today, the introduction of “democracy” to Iraq is considered an American gift so precious that it somehow makes up for anything that’s happened in the past eight years. This is why, for instance, pundit Tom Friedman could write this sentence about the “U.S. project in Iraq”: “Former president George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right.”

Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is now largely the “forgotten” war, and here’s a little of what’s been forgotten in the process, of what Friedman suggests he’d prefer to leave future historians to sort out: that the American invasion led to possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; that literally millions of Iraqis had to flee into exile abroad and millions more were turned into refugees in their own country; that the capital, Baghdad, was significantly ethnically cleansed in a brutal Shiite-Sunni civil conflict; that the country was littered with new “killing fields”; that a devastating insurgency roiled the land and still brings enough death and terror to Baghdad to make it one of the more dangerous places on the planet; that a soaring unemployment rate and the lack of delivery of the most basic services, including reliable electricity and potable water, created nightmarish conditions for a vast class of impoverished Iraqis; that the U.S. government, for all its nation-building boasts, proved remarkably incapable of “reconstructing” the country or its oil industry, even though American private contractors profited enormously from work on both; that a full-scale foreign military occupation left Americans on almost three hundred bases nationwide and in the largest embassy on the planet; that American advisers remain attached to, and deeply embedded in, an Iraqi military that still lacks a credible air force and is unlikely to be able to operate and resupply itself on its own for years to come.

In other words, as bad as Saddam Hussein was (and he was a megalomaniacal monster), what followed him was a staggering catastrophe for Iraq, even if Americans no longer care to give it much thought. Against the charnel house that Friedman would prefer to leave to history, however, stands one counterbalancing factor, the gift of “democracy.” Even many who never supported George W. Bush’s “democracy agenda” now seem to take some pride in this.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that the Bush administration arrived in Iraq with remarkably undemocratic plans for the country and was thwarted only by the unwavering insistence of the revered Shiite cleric Ali Sistani on a one-person, one-vote election. In all of this, there are staggering levels of hypocrisy—in the fact that we were for Saddam before we were against him. In the fact, as well, that the U.S. government has, in instance after instance, regularly fostered and supported military juntas, strongmen, and dictators, while holding off or overthrowing democracies not to our taste or not in what Washington defined as our interests.

Perhaps stranger yet, the democracy that we actually have in the United States—and so can offer as our ultimate apology for invading and occupying other countries—is rarely subjected to analysis in the context of the glorious urge to export the same. So let’s just stop for a moment and think a little about the American urge to be thrilled that, despite every disaster, against all odds, our grand accomplishment lies in bringing American democracy to Iraq.

Democracy, like terrorism, is a method, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Nobody is ruled by elections any more than any organization is run by terror or has terror as its ultimate goal. If this obvious point had been accepted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the absurdity of the idea of a Global War on Terror would have been self-evident, as would a global war to deliver “democracy” to faraway peoples.

Democracy, after all, is a way to determine and then express the majoritarian will of a people, a way to deliver power to “the people” or, more important, for those people to take possession of it themselves. It’s the sort of thing that, by its nature, is hard to import from great distances, especially when, as in our case, the delivery system to be exported seems strikingly deficient. And keep in mind that the “people” exporting that system to Iraq were largely incapable of seeing Iraqis as actors in their own democratic drama. They were incapable, that is, of imagining the nature of the lives they wanted to shape and change.

In a sense, that was hardly less true when they looked homeward. After all, the glorious democracy they trumpeted to the world bore little relation to the Pax Republicana headed by an imperial presidency (complete with a cult of executive power) that they dreamed of installing in Washington for generations to come. Given the nature of American democracy today—the first billion-dollar presidential election, the staggering levels of lobbying and influence-peddling that go with it, the stunning barrages of bizarre advertising, the difficulty of displacing incumbents in Congress, the increasingly corporate-owned and financed campaigns, a half-broken congressional system, a national security state with unparalleled powers and money, and so on—why all the effort to take it to Iraq? Why measure Iraqis against it and find them lacking? After all, in 2000, our presidential election went to the non-majoritarian candidate, thanks to decisions made by Supreme Court justices appointed by his father. If this had happened in Nigeria, Afghanistan, or perhaps Iraq, we would know just what we were dealing with.

The fact is we have no word to adequately describe what, at the national level, we still persist in calling “democracy,” what we regularly ask others to admire to the skies or bow down before. Writing for the website Talking Points Memo Café, Todd Gitlin termed our system a “semi-democracy.” That, at least, represents an honest start.

In imperial China, when a new dynasty arrived on the scene, the emperor performed a ritual called the “rectification of names” in the belief that the previous dynasty had fallen in part because reality and the names we have for it had ceased to correspond. We in the United States undoubtedly now need such a ceremony. We certainly need a new term for our own “democracy” before we’re so quick to hold it up as the paragon for others to match.

We also need to rethink our language when it comes to the U.S. military undertaking “nation building” in distant lands—as if countries could be constructed to our taste in just the way that KBR or DynCorp construct military bases in them. We need to stop our commanders from bragging about our skill in creating a “government in a box” for our Afghan friends, when our government at home is largely boxed-in and strikingly dysfunctional.

So, no, I have never been to Iraq, but yes, I’ve been here for years, watching, and I can see, among other things, that the American mirror on the wall, which shows us ourselves in such beautiful, Disneyesque detail, has a few cracks in it. It looks fragile. I’d think twice about sending it abroad too often.

Thirty-two of the thirty-three pieces that make up this book were written between April 2010 and mid-2011, thirty-one for my website TomDispatch.com. Barely more than a year on the calendar, but given our exploding world, it seemed like years, not months. Has there ever been a time—not in my life anyway—when so much seemed to happen all at once? So consider this my small record of a period when, for all the fear-suffused attempts to lock America down, the world came pouring in anyway. It’s important, however, to note that the essays included here are not the originals I wrote. They were edited, trimmed or cut down, modestly updated, and woven into book form. The tell-tale signs of the immediate moment—all the recently s and next week s, along with examples that were gripping then but are forgotten today—have been removed; as have most of the thematic repetitions that are bound to pop up in any set of weekly responses to ongoing events. Nothing basic or significant about them has, however, been changed; for better or worse, nothing had to be, which tells you something about our present world.