26 May 2005
Disgruntled Iraqis
In the Wall Street Journal on 24 May 2005, Bernard Lewis elucidates the very reason that democratic institutions of government cannot be imposed, deus ex machina, on countries without the political traditions of the United States and other liberal regimes. The dangerous fallacy in his argument for the creation of a loyal opposition in the yet-to-be constituted Iraqi government is that confidence in participating in a democracy can grow in a society whose members have no history of sharing a stake in its benefits, or belief that that stake will be rewarding.
In the West, it took centuries of civilization for that belief to prevail. In the East, the history has been shorter, primarily because of rapid economic development, rule of law and relaxed information flows. None of these events has yet occurred in Iraq, or in many other nations of the Middle East.
Mr. Lewis should be well aware how anomalous is the condition of the Middle East. It won’t do any good to excoriate Iraqis for stubbornly resisting a key ingredient of successful democracy. The wealthy powers that disrupted the apple cart there must devote the patience and resources needed to foreshorten the process of building a tradition of loyalty to participatory democracy.
In the Wall Street Journal on 24 May 2005, Bernard Lewis elucidates the very reason that democratic institutions of government cannot be imposed, deus ex machina, on countries without the political traditions of the United States and other liberal regimes. The dangerous fallacy in his argument for the creation of a loyal opposition in the yet-to-be constituted Iraqi government is that confidence in participating in a democracy can grow in a society whose members have no history of sharing a stake in its benefits, or belief that that stake will be rewarding.
In the West, it took centuries of civilization for that belief to prevail. In the East, the history has been shorter, primarily because of rapid economic development, rule of law and relaxed information flows. None of these events has yet occurred in Iraq, or in many other nations of the Middle East.
Mr. Lewis should be well aware how anomalous is the condition of the Middle East. It won’t do any good to excoriate Iraqis for stubbornly resisting a key ingredient of successful democracy. The wealthy powers that disrupted the apple cart there must devote the patience and resources needed to foreshorten the process of building a tradition of loyalty to participatory democracy.
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