He uses "democracy" as the standard for success in Iraq, yet that just isn't so. His use of "consensual" at the beginning of this article was a much better description of what we want to achieve.
And like everyone he misses the true overarching object which is to open the mideast to commerce with the world- and the US.
It is an irresistable competition that forces republican governance upon a nation because that is the only one that can compete- and it's pleasant in it's own right.
A muslim republic in earnest commerce with the world is the shining example Iraq will set before the dictators and their subjects of the mideast.
Doubly clever because (1) it puts the issues in perspective and that (2) people actually were asking that sort of question back then, as a dig through the archives of Life magazine has proven. Mostly those folks shut up when the camps were liberated - their latter-day counterparts choose to ignore the existence of Saddam's atrocities or explain them away with an airy "we didn't care in 1980, why should we care now?" Hmm..."we didn't care about Dachau in 1940, why should we in 1945?" Sounds a little hollow, doesn't it?
I think Hanson is correct about the potentially revolutionary nature of this particular action. Without repeating all his points (and much more poorly than he put it above - the guy can write) I'd like to pick on a couple and expand a bit.
The contrast between European and UN pretension and U.S. action in the matter is becoming more obvious now that the smoke has cleared a bit. I think it will become glaring as Iraq comes back to its feet that their more "civilized" approach really did stink of Chamberlain at Munich. The damage to the UN's credibility after 13 years of useless blathering is incalculable. They need to address this and soon, but the necessary cooperation with the U.S. will be blocked by the same folks who got the UN into that position in the first place. They absolutely will not admit they were wrong, and the UN will find this difficult to work around.
That radical Islamic movements are aware of the mortal threat this constitutes to them is evident by the level of terrorist activity they have instituted in Iraq (more importantly, by the level of resources in men, weapons, and cash that is directed there rather than elsewhere). When Iraq flourishes it will be impossible to deflect the questions of why Palestine has not despite a half-century of Arab patronage and "support." What the radicals do not want asked is "all right, you can perpetuate age-old feuds and drag one another into poverty or you can rise above it as the Kurds did and get rich, and your children won't have to wear plastic explosives around. Which is it going to be?"
Hanson mentioned the threat this poses to the formal autocracies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and others whose citizens have not coincidentally figured large in the terrorist effort to destabilize a nascent Iraqi democracy. It is huge. Saudi Arabia is already experiencing the classic problems inherent in succession in a monarchy, Egypt is vacillating between representative government and military dictatorship, and Syria is beginning to look increasingly isolated internationally as its own support of terrorism becomes more and more revealed. But it is none of these countries that the tipping point for the whole anachronistic system resides - that would be in Iran, IMHO. And if Iran goes democratic the whole rotten system will find itself headed at full speed toward the ash heap of history.
Interesting times.
Probably the greatest, clearest fallacy, however, is that it assumes a malleability of human types that has never been demonstrated anywhere. In this it makes very unlikely attributions of cause to a great many events, and smooths over or ignorores a great many factors that render its points more than a little doubtful.
Personally, I wish the various Iraqi peoples well, but fear that their chance to be a major example to the world has probably not yet recovered from the slaughters wrought by the Mongols on the people of their once great culture.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hanson has done little more than reiterate the fallacious Dean Rusk foreign policy of the 1960s--a disaster for our interests. He of course errs in his Wilsonian quip. Wilson, befuddled as he was in foreign affairs, would never have supported our present Iraqi plan, which apparently still insists on keeping the ethnically distinct peoples together--whether they like it or not.
My views on this sort of policy are recorded at Democracy In The Third World, so I am not pleading lack of time to avoid setting forth an alternative viewpoint.
William Flax