Jim Austin

His previous columns are archived HERE.

JIM AUSTIN

Democracy by force

We skeptics have long pondered the real reason for our invasion of Iraq. What was the point? We had Hussein bottled up and corked like a scorpion in a jam jar. We had sanctions imposed so he couldn't sell oil for weapons and "no-fly" zones so he couldn't sneak off to purchase uranium yellow cake or anthrax starter kits.

Did we really want his oil as many have speculated?

I don't think so.

Oil would have been a nice ancillary benefit along with the garlands of roses draped around the necks of our conquering troops but that was not the root cause for our invasion.

The White House cadre of policy makers, the "neo-cons," wanted to plant the seed of democracy in the Middle East and watch it grow. Well, democracy at the point of a gun seems not to be working.

We have found that if you force feed democracy like a French goose you do not get foie gras. What you get is an olio of violence, confusion, torture, and the beginnings of a legacy of hatred that may take decades to diminish.

In 1900 there was not a single democracy on earth. There wasn't one country that held fair elections where everyone of age was eligible to vote.

In the USA, for example, women didn't get the right to vote until 1920. Today, 119 countries have democracies and 62 percent of the world's countries hold free elections.

Why do you suppose that is?

A big reason is technology. Another big reason is the USA.

Because of the Internet, TV, and radio the rest of the world is able to see the liberty we enjoy, the standard of living we have, and the individual freedoms that they may not possess. Fascism is a thing of the past and communism is clearly a dead-end system. Even dictatorships put on sham elections in a vain attempt to copy the democratic process.

So if things are going so swimmingly for democracy as a system of government, why did we decide it was our duty to hurry the process along? Democracy is far from perfect. In our case we elected an administration with an agenda that was wrong.

They were the wrong men for the job and shame on us for electing them.

In the case of Germany in the 1930s, the people elected Hitler. They were wrong, too. What is to stop the brutalized Iraqi people from electing some eyeball-rolling fundamentalist fanatic on day one of their first national election? The chances of that seem pretty good, considering the huge accumulation of bad will that our armies have built up.

The truth is that democracy will thrive and develop all over the world if we just leave it alone and let it develop from within. Did the Bush people not see the world go from 0 percent to 62 percent democratic in the last hundred years?

Did they not notice the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Who did we invade to initiate the fall of the Soviet Union?

Incidentally, has it occurred to the Bush crowd that we have done Iran a huge favor? We completed their 80s war with Iraq and they didn't spend a dime or lose a single soldier.

The Bush Administration is in chaos. They are confused and blindly arrogant, a very bad combination. Another Vietnam is no longer on the horizon -- it is upon us.

As in Vietnam we have trumped up a bogus excuse to invade. We tried to force our system of government down the throats of the people and we ended up fighting a war against an enemy that can fade easily into the general population.

We have squandered decades of good will among our allies. We have turned the entire Islamic world against us. Our own liberty is threatened.

Time to take this flawed system of ours and make it work. Oust Bush and send him to build his Presidential Library in Guantanamo.