I'm trying not to set up a strawman but really dig at what's useful and what's dangerous about the assumptions that seem to underlie these attitudes. Although these comments originated in response to praktike's article on Feith's astonishing lack of preparation for the occupation period, it's not simply a matter of trying to understand how they screwed up so badly. Rather than refight old skirmishes, the goals is to draw some broad lessons.
Since they are, at least superficially, the foundation of Bush's undoubtedly cynical "freedom's on the march" campaign meme, I think they're worth exploring from a "going forward" point of view as well.
The intellectual background of the neocons in the Bush Admin and their pundit/think-tank supporters is as pushers of the "limited government" argument: government just sets the "rules of the road" and makes sure that people generally don't violate the rules at the expense of others. And otherwise, gets out of the way. A fine objective for a mature political and economic system. It's also an instructive concept for a nascent system, with very limited institutional capacity, to set priorities on where it ought to focus that capacity.
Fukuyama pronounces himself horrified that these same people who are critics of state intervention beyond a limited set of roles, primarily because they believe top-down or centrally directed change is both inefficient (incompetent) and distorts optimal outcomes, could undertake such a grandiose experiment in centrally directed change as rebuilding Iraq politically and economically.
Yet they didn't seem to find the disconnect uncomfortable. Is it possible that the reason is their lodestone of political philosophy -- relying on marketplaces of ideas and political and economic power -- overlooks just how messy and uncertain the process is, however. The the invisible hand of the marketplaces of ideas and power -- just like marketplaces for money, goods and services -- may indeed optimize outcomes for the general welfare if they are orderly and transparent markets.
Even so, we shouldn't expect the marketplace to be "tidy" (in Rumsfeld's words) or produce clear outcomes any time soon. But marketplaces get hijacked. Adam Smith was neither the first nor the last to point out that people are always trying to maneuver their way into either cornering/dominating the market or changing the rules for their own benefit. Even more so when the stakes are enormous, as they are when the winds of destruction (creative or otherwise) have come sweeping through a system, and many of the old sources of power and wealth have been destroyed or severely damaged.
[OT -- I've frequently asked when people complain about the oligarchs and the corrupt privatization processes in Russia, "what did you expect of the fight over the enormously valuable Russian resources after the break-up of the USSR"? One thing was certain -- it wasn't going to be pretty.]
It's one thing for Bush/Cheney to appropriate the liberation=freedom=democracy theme for political purposes. They and the neocons seem, however, to have bought their own propaganda. Do they truly fail to grasp that major liberalization in the economic sphere and democratization in the political sphere are revolutions -- with all the turmoil and violence (socially and economically if not physically) that comes with revolutions. These liberalizing events are not orderly, sequential transfers of power from one group to another who then operate, going forward, under a new, coherent set of "rules of the road".
As more and more people recognize explicitly, the creation of new institutional structures or transformation of old ones is a much longer process -- generational turnover required at the least. But what much of the discussion about democratization seems to ignore is that institutional structures don't simply grow according to the original genetic code they are given at their initial creation. They arise in response to their environment (which at least at the start is a revolutionary one), are shaped by revolutionary outcomes, and in turn shape the environment to come.
This misunderstanding of "nature vs nurture" and the timing mismatch between letting the genie out of the bottle and building reliable, predictable, orderly institutions, seems to have been at the heart of much of the CPA bungling. Some of them indeed recognized that institutions take time to build -- hence their plans for a 4-5 year CPA control period with gradual handover of authority to Iraqis as they became "ready" to manage specific functions. But Bremer and the CPA were slow to realize they wouldn't have the luxury of time. Rather than create an orderly transformation, they added to disorder by getting rid of the old regime's arrangements and starting down a path of planned sequences of eventually having a good set of "rules of the road" and modern, efficient ministries, legal and political institutions. And when it became clear their days as official controllers were numbered, their priorities were on leaving behind a set of immutable rules and marginalizing/destroying the "anti-order" revolutionary forces. They were creating more vacuums rather than encouraging the Iraqis in favor of establishing an orderly system to start filing vacuums that were already created by the overthrow of the regime and the CPA's activities for a year.
Will January solve the legitimacy problem? It's certainly too late for that, if it was ever possible, even with early elections called for by Sistani and others last year. The primary benefit of elections is to start down the road toward legitimacy, at least for a portion of the population.
Elections, and the organization of a government in their aftermath, would hopefully create another arena within which battles for power can focus -- an arena that could lead to some intermediate outcomes that are more constructive than those being "achieved" in the current battles being fought with physical violence. It would also hopefully encourage those battling for power (as distinct from those battling for chaos) to focus organizational energies on something other than physical fighting and intimidation.
The one "bright spot" I see in the current chaos of vacuums the CPA produced is that it certainly reduces the likelihood of a good old-fashioned coup. Those classic levers of national control -- army, secret police and TV broadcasting -- just aren't available to another Saddam.
But hey, I'm just the optimistic type.
UPDATE [9-15-04 8:45PM] by nadezhda
Apparently my bemusement is shared by others. Matthew Barganier from the antiwar.com blog collects some remarks that display a more open frustration than Fukuyama's. The note is addressed to the moral agonizing of "libertarian hawks" rather than to Fukuyama's neocons, but there is considerable overlap. It's short, so here it goes in full.
Does My Exasperation Count as Blowback?
One of the worst things about this war (and the cluster of quasi-libertarian arguments used to justify it) has been the incredible mental toll it has inflicted on libertarianism. Instead of tending our own garden – working to smash, reduce, or at least slow the state that oppresses us – libertarians have typed keyboards to death over fundamental issues even goddamn liberals understand. To wit: Matthew Yglesias:[T]he notion that anything even remotely resembling libertarianism could underwrite an effort to conscript huge quantities of resources from the American public and deploy them in an attempt to wholly remake the social and political order in a foreign country is too absurd to merit a rebuttal. ... As long as the conversation is supposed to be proceeding on the shared basis of libertarianism, however, one hardly needs to say anything. It's coercion, it's planning, it's every non-libertarian thing under the sun.Yet I can't go to a libertarian site without enduring some soporific marathon debate about a no-brainer, i.e., that waging preemptive (read: aggressive) war (read: death and destruction) to impose democracy (fer Chrissakes!) on people who never even posed a threat to us is, uh, wrong. As Gene Healy once wrote,
I continue to be perplexed by the fact that smarter people than me think that a political philosophy that tells you what to think about mandatory recycling has nothing to offer on the question of when one might morally employ daisy cutters and thermobaric bombs.
At least these folks are worrying their keyboards to death over a moral issue they don't expect Dr Pangloss to solve for them.
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