Realistic Expectations for Iraq

This short cut and paste presents a scenario which I find plausible and acceptable-----given the circumstances and the obstacles. Would this be unacceptable to you?

Tilting the Playing Field
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: May 30, 2004




The American public has been treated to such a festival of mea, wea and hea culpas on Iraq lately it could be forgiven for feeling utterly lost. Americans are caught between a president who continues to wax utopian about Iraq and an analytical community that has become consumed by despair. This is no way to run a railroad. There are better ways to think about this problem. A good place to start is by thinking about Russia.

I have a "Tilt Theory of History." The Tilt Theory states that countries and cultures do not change by sudden transformations. They change when, by wise diplomacy and leadership, you take a country, a culture or a region that has been tilted in the wrong direction and tilt it in the right direction, so that the process of gradual internal transformation can take place over a generation.

I believe that history will judge George Bush 41, Mikhail Gorbachev, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand very kindly for the way they collectively took the Soviet Empire, which was tilted in the wrong direction for so long, and tilted it in the right direction, with barely a shot fired. That was one of the great achievements of the 20th century.

Is Vladimir Putin's Russia today a Jeffersonian democracy? Of course not. But it is a huge nation that was tilted in the wrong direction and is now tilted in the right direction. My definition of a country tilted in the right direction is a country where there is enough free market, enough rule of law, enough free press, speech and exchange of ideas that the true agent of change in history ?- which is something that takes nine months and 21 years to develop, i.e. a generation ?- can grow up, plan its future and realize its potential.

Democracy-building is always a work in progress ?- two steps forward, one step back. No one should have expected a utopian transformation of Iraq. Iraq is like every other tribalized Arab state, where democracy is everyone's third choice. Their first choice is always: "My tribe wins and my rivals lose." Second choice is: "My tribe loses, so yours must lose too." Third choice is: "My tribe wins and so do my rivals."

Our hope should be that Iraqis back into democracy, back into that third choice ?- not as a result of reading our Bill of Rights but by reading their own situation and deciding that a pragmatic, power-sharing compromise among themselves is better than endless violence. Democracy will take root in Iraq through realism, not idealism. We did not and cannot liberate Iraqis. They have to liberate themselves. That is what the Japanese and Germans did. All we can hope to do is help them tilt their country in a positive direction so the next generation grows up in an environment where progressive forces and win-win politics are not stymied by a predatory state tilted against them.

"I think this is a good time for sober realism, which means focusing on what is possible in Iraq, and what is the minimum we want from Iraq, not on what we would ideally like in Iraq," notes Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert, whose delightful new book, just out this week, entitled "The Meaning of Sports," contains many parallels between what makes for successful teams and successful countries. "The minimum we want is an Iraq that is reasonably stable, and doesn't harbor terrorists or threaten its neighbors."

As one who believed ?- and still does ?- in the possibility and the importance of tilting the Arab-Muslim world from the wrong directions detailed in the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Reports to the right ones, I detest the politically driven failures of the Bush team in Iraq. In a panic, the Bush team, having lost its exaggerated realist rationale for the war ?- W.M.D. ?- has now gone to the other extreme and offered us an exaggerated idealist rationale ?- that all Iraqis crave freedom and democracy and we can deliver this transformation shortly, if we just stick to it.

We need to rebalance our policy. We still have a chance to do in Iraq the only thing that was always the only thing possible ?- tilt it in a better direction ?- so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want. What might an Iraq tilted in the right direction look like? It would be more religious than Turkey, more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria, more democratic than Saudi Arabia and more stable than Afghanistan.