OxBlog

# Posted 10:00 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

THIS IS A JOB FOR OXDEM!!! Wouldn't it be nice if the entire Bush administration had a firm commitment to democratizing Iraq? Then Josh and I could actually spend time working on our dissertations. But before I get to the bad news, here's some good:

Daniel Drezner's brilliant column in TNR exposes the false premises of the nonstop talk about how hard it will be to bring democracy to Iraq. As he observes,

...it is intellectually fashionable these days to believe that local conditions always triumph over grand theory. But the local conditions argument overlooks a crucial detail: Over the past century, international factors have been more important than domestic factors in determining the success of democratic transition and consolidation. And the international factors surrounding Iraq are more favorable than one might think.

Read the rest of the column to find out what those factors are. (Tony Smith, if you're reading this, I know you deserve credit for the "international factors" argument as well.

The bad news is that international factor #1 (the US government) can't get it's act together. Also in TNR, Lawrence Kaplan provides a devastating account of the State Department's efforts to trade democracy for stability in postwar Iraq. [Full text for subscribers only.]

Foggy Bottom's strategy for ensuring stability is to leave most of the centralized Ba'ath power structure in place after the war, rather than signing off on a federal constitution that would give considerable authority to Iraq's provincial governments. As Jacob Levy explains in (guess where!) TNR, a federal state structure is the best means of balancing ethnic voting blocs as well as stopping authoritariansim from emerging at the center.

The main flaw in Kaplan's account is its whitewash of the Iraqi opposition-in-exile supported by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. As both TNR and OxBlog have argued, however, there is good reason to believe that the opposition-in-exile is power hungry, incompetent, and unable to command the loyalty of anyone actually living in Iraq.

Thus, an extended US occupation may be quite a good thing if it gives time for indigenous democratic forces to organize themselves and draft a workable constitution. If the State Department directs the occupation, that may never happen. However, there are signs that the Pentagon will insist on taking control if an extended occupation is what the president decides on.

So things may work out all right in the end, thanks to a strange sort of dumb luck that combines the best of the Pentagon and State Department's flawed proposals for rebuilding Iraq.

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