Spreading Democracy

While my daughter Sarahbeth was gone for the last month, I borrowed one of her college books to read.  Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower argues in the first couple of chapters that the new liberal democracies in Europe failed after WWI because (1) the constitutions were poorly constructed, and (2) people didn't actually want modern democracy but a society that worked.  The new democratic arrangements wilted between the passionate Communism on the Left and the fascist authoritarianism (as well as the lingering yearning for the old monarchies) on the Right.  Here's one paragraph:

Unambiguous support for democracy was thin on the ground throughout Europe. Guglielmo Ferrero remarked in 1925 that democracy's failure in Italy was chiefly due to the lack of a strong democratic party. But not only in Italy. The core group of old-time liberals were marginal figures in the inter-war years, their battles largely won with the defeat of monarchs and aristocracies....Mass suffrage threatened them with a marginal political role in the face of the great parties of the Left, of conservatism and nationalism, and of Catholicism. Fear of communism, in particular, drew many liberals toward authoritarian solutions. They were joined there by other kinds of elitists--the social engineers, business managers and technocrats, who wanted scientific, apolitical solutions to society's ills and were impatient with the instability and incompetence of parliamentary rule.

Many conservatives, for their part, were no happier with inter-war democracy and were keen to see a return to more elitist, aristocratic and occasionally even monarchical modes of governnment. For them the problem with democracy lay in the power it gave the masses, in the supposed incompatibility of democracy and authority. They were prone to attack democracy on ethical grounds too. It placed too much stress on rights and not enough on duties. It had bred egotism and sectional self-interest and had thus contributed to its own downfall by failing to encourage a civic consciousness or a sense of community....

Now, if this was true in early 20th century Europe, the most democratic part of the world (other than America), then how successful can 'liberal democracy' possibility be in places where 'the democratic support on the ground' is super thin? For example, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last night in that Rachel Maddow interview with the Iraqi family, after saying the government couldn't even provide electricity, the father of the family said that what he wanted was 'one leader'.  Doesn't sound like parliamentary democracy's going to succeed there either.

Which leads me to this final citation about the purposes of our being in Iraq.  A veteran of Iraq had spent his time in Iraq trying to train Iraq troops and had very little support in doing so from his American army superiors.  He believed we were there to spead democracy. But after returning home to America and ruminating on the purposes of the invasion and occupation, the soldier said this in The American Conservative:

I returned home in September 2005, grateful and safe, but stripped of the illusions I had taken with me. My experience proved that contrary to countless official pronouncements, the Bush administration has no interest in the Iraqi army training program. We were fighting a war to establish permanent bases in Iraq to better manipulate the flow of Middle East oil. For if this war was about human rights, why were we not in Rwanda? If our mission was about bringing democracy to a region, then why were we not in Cuba? And if the intelligence leading up to this war was merely faulty, why was no one fired?

I believed in my mission, and I wanted the Iraqis I was training to run their own country. But this wasn’t an American priority, and I left Mosul feeling that my efforts were either erased or ignored.

Military bases and oil.  Maintaining, if not expanding, the American Empire.  That's why we're over there.