Mitchell Cohen Response

Mitchell Cohen Response

Mr. and Ms. Left, tear down these words: Totalitarianism, Imperialism. No, I don’t mean that our voices ought not to roar against these bad, brutal things, just that we should stop using these terms. Once they had value; now they function increasingly like langue de bois,, as the French call it, wooden language, jargon, substitutes for substance or knowledge, especially local knowledge . . . of Iraq, for instance. In books, op-eds, and sound bites, we are treated to a parade of authorities, many of whom could not have found Kirkuk on a map five years ago. Some of the war’s planners seem to have been clueless about political geography and political cultures. If you listen to some antiwar activists, you would think that “Shaat al-Arab” is what a drawling Texan president wanted to boast after blowing away Saddam with a six-shooter. The Shaat al-Arab is a short waterway into the Persian Gulf on the Iran-Iraq border. Dispute over it was central to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.

Consider this a protest against master categories, a call to disenchant our bitter arguments about the disaster in Iraq. The ideas we use, including democracy, must be a function of what they engage, not our intellectual vanities. Otherwise we end up with a wooden stick . . . in our heads. And we will bang our skulls against intransigent realities that just won’t do what our sure convictions dictate.

Should Saddam have been ousted by force? Would democracy probably have ensued? These are very different questions.

Recall an old debate, now in the dust-bin of history, that vexed the historic left: Are there preconditions for socialism? Can you skip them in quest of a better world? Drop the word socialism, sift through the muck, and you will find a rational kernel within the bin. It takes form in these questions: Are there preconditions for democracy? Can you skip them in quest of a better world?

I think there are preconditions, especially of political culture, although every case is distinct. Rousseau protested rightly in The Social Contract against the belief that one form of government suits all times and places in all circumstances. It is reckless to wishful-think preconditions away. The will to democracy is only one of democracy’s preconditions.

Some—not all—in the Bush administration believed that the forceful destruction of Iraq’s regime would establish instant democracy. They were wrong. Nonetheless, it is true that the development of democracy is stimulated more often by external trauma than its advocates like to admit. Were postwar Japan, Germany, or the ex-Soviet bloc relevant examples for Iraq? Some aspects of them are pertinent, others not.

Japan, for instance, is a contradictory case, and even complicates some points I’ve just made. America had “no plan to induce a democratic revolution” in Japan as of early 1945, according to John W. Dower’s remarkable study Embr...