Was Iraq a Fool's Errand?

If the war was a strategic mistake, it still opened the possibility for historic political progress in Iraq. And if the Bush administration bungled the postwar planning and management, as I believe it did, this did not preclude significant improvements and a more positive outcome down the road. I therefore do not regard my service in Iraq as a "fool's errand." Nor do I believe that the thousands of brave and dedicated individuals working for the United States, other coalition allies, the UN, and a myriad of democracy-and development-promoting NGOs are tools or fools, tilting at windmills.

Smith's intellectual error-a common one in writing about democracy these days-is to dismiss the possibility for democracy in countries that do not meet the standard economic, social, and cultural preconditions. After 25 years of weighing the evidence and studying democratic development in more than two dozen countries, I have concluded that there in fact are no preconditions for democracy other than a commitment by political elites to implement it (and, one hopes, broad popular support as well). Yes, richer countries fare better. But today, almost a third of the countries with "low human development" (according to the UN Development Program) are democracies. Yes, oil dependence is a curse, and deep ethnic divisions make democracy even more difficult to sustain. But Nigeria and Indonesia both have this volatile mix, and with all their problems and corruption, they are sustaining democracy in the popular belief that it is better than any other form of government. In the past 30 years, some 88 countries have made transitions to democracy. Many of them had "no tradition of limited or responsible government," "no middle class to speak of independent from the state," no strong unifying national identity, and no Nelson Mandela. Yet only about a dozen of the democracies that emerged during this period have broken down, even temporarily, and in many countries lacking Smith's prerequisites, democracy is gaining in viability and popularity.

Most intellectuals and commentators who dismiss Iraq as a hopeless prospect for democracy have failed to consult the Iraqi people. They did not see what many of us in the Coalition Provisional Authority, the UN, and other international groups saw: a people fed up with tyranny, who strongly aspire to live in freedom and to choose their own leaders. True, this aspiration is not shared by all Iraqis. And neighboring states such as Syria and Iran are determined to thwart it. The quest for democracy in Iraq faces long odds, but these do not predetermine failure. If large numbers of people in a country are willing to risk their lives and fortunes to build a democracy, don't we all have some obligation to help them? Even if the outcome is not an instant Costa Rica but a struggling and conflicted semidemocracy, that is still better for the Iraqi people than some new form of tyranny, or the anarchy that would result if the world simply threw up its hands and withdrew.

Smith condemns "liberal NGOs and individuals" who are helping to build democracy in Iraq as having "made a pact with the devil." We should never invade and conquer a country merely because we want to see it become a democracy. That kind of imperial mission is likely to fail, and it will discredit democracy promotion worldwide. But Iraq was invaded and its dictatorship toppled in a preemptive war driven mainly by security concerns, however misjudged. The challenge after the war was to build a more decent, lawful, and democratic political order-something the Iraqi people desperately want.

Despite all its mistakes, I do not regard that postwar endeavor as a "pact with the devil." Let Smith and other critics visit Iraq and talk to Iraqis who are organizing for democracy, development, and human rights. Let them talk to the families that lived in constant, humiliating fear under Baathist rule. Let them see some of the roughly 300 mass graves of opponents of the regime who were brutally slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands. Then they will find out who the devil really was.