IN A televised address following the capture of Saddam Hussein last December, President George W. Bush proclaimed the dawn of a new era in Iraqi history, in which the fear, violence and ethnic rivalry of the past would be replaced by the peaceful cooperation of all Iraqis in building a better future. "A hopeful day has arrived," he said. "All Iraqis can now come together and reject violence and build a new Iraq."
The notion of Iraqis working together to shape their common destiny has always been more myth than reality, but sometime last week, the American occupation seems to have brought about the new Iraqi nationalism that Bush's high-flown rhetoric never could. As coalition troops battled Sunni holdouts in Western Iraq and Shiite rebels in Baghdad and several southern cities, there were increasing indications that Iraq's fractious ethnic groups were cooperating in their fight to drive American forces from the country.
In Baghdad, Shiites lined up to donate blood for resistance fighters in Fallujah, the western city whose Sunni residents have fought fiercely against the American occupation. Meanwhile, aid convoys jammed the road to the besieged city, bearing food and medical supplies donated by Baghdad's Shiite families. Military leaders downplayed the apparent unity of Sunni and Shiite forces, but acknowledged that there were signs of cooperation at the tactical level.
If they weren't persuaded before, the simultaneous rebellion of Sunnis and Shiites should convince Americans that the goodwill of an occupied nation is not sufficient to support the grand political project that Bush had planned for Iraq. In the months before the war, it was widely expected that Iraq's Shiite majority would welcome the American occupation with open arms, having suffered most brutally under Hussein's regime. But whatever joy Shiites took in the downfall of their oppressor was matched by suspicion of their new rulers. The transformation of this suspicion into outright hostility illustrates the utter naivety of Bush's pre-war vision, in which jubilant Iraqis cooperated with their benevolent occupiers in building a representative democracy.
It's too late to cut and run, but there's always time to reexamine the logic that led Americans to join Bush in his fairy tale crusade.
The foundation of America's political mission in Iraq was the belief that that authoritarian regimes are a political aberration and that all people will embrace democracy if simply given the chance. In making the case for war, Bush claimed that Iraqis were ready and willing to govern themselves, to write a constitution and to serve as a beacon of democracy in a region that has long known only despotism. But the birth of democracy requires far more than the death of dictatorship. It requires, among other things, a level of social trust and national unity that Iraqis have thus far shown only in their attacks on American troops, the supposed midwives of democracy.
The other pillar of Operation Iraqi Freedom was the belief that America should serve as the executor of history. Bush has frequently cast the invasion of Iraq in a messianic light, referring often to Iraq's ancient culture and the ageless appeal of freedom. But the belief that America ought to save the world is the ideological cousin of the belief that America ought to rule the world, and the relationship is closer still when oppressed populations don't share our vision of salvation. Bush has said plainly that American troops will leave Iraq as soon as a democratic government is prepared to administer the country, but as long as Iraqis are unable or unwilling to form such a government, America's mission in Iraq will be no different from any other military occupation, requiring the sustained application of force in order to pacify a hostile nation.
Given the massive odds facing America's democratic project and the failure of investigators to find anything more than program-related activity in Iraq's phantom weapons laboratories, it seems the forceful governance of Iraq was a task best left to Hussein. And in light of the violent rebellion of Iraq's newly liberated masses, I'd like to offer some advice that might sound familiar to the president who once called for a humble foreign policy: It's not our job to save the world, and it's not our place to rule it. We're stuck in Iraq for the time being, but if nothing else, the rapid deterioration of our mission there should convince every American that democracy by force and history by design are impossible.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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