Yesterday was another great day for Iraq — an estimated 70% of registered voters braved long lines and possible violence to vote. One vote (or even increasing participation over three votes as has been seen) isn’t the final step of the march to democracy. But it is a significant milestone of that march. The hardest test of all isn’t coming out to vote, but the peaceful transfer of power from one faction to another as a result of an election. The United States didn’t face this test until 1800 and the election of Thomas Jefferson – 24 years after he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
It is often said that you can’t impose democracy by force which seems to me a total misread of the typical situtation. Normally, you have to use force to stop those who seek to suppress democracy – the British in 1776, Hitler & Tojo in 1941, Saddam in 2003. And force can be required to keep a country democratic, from opponents both internal and external. But truly representative government is popular enough that you don’t have to impose it by force, even in cases like the United States where people nearly universally are willing to abide by results of elections they don’t even bother to vote in. Is anybody forcing the Iraqi’s to vote? Or are they voting because they see representative government as a solution to some of their most pressing problems?
I’ve maintained all along that the war in Iraq will be won or lost (from the American point of view) by the Iraqi’s themselves. Our job was to provide enough security, aid, advice, and yes, encouragement so that the people of Iraq could set up their own democratic government and security forces that they could defeat the insurgents themselves. We could not, nor should we try, to obliterate the insurgancy, set up a fully functioning democratic country in Iraq, and then turn all this over to Iraqi’s who had had not part up until then. There is no such thing as a turnkey country. If we had, it would have collapsed like a house of cards as soon as we left.
