A sobering account of Iraq — from a CPA advisor
Larry Diamond — one of the biggest supporters of the notion that democracy can travel across cultures — was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq starting in January. No longer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a long story about Diamond’s experiences in the field. He’s still optimistic about democracy promotion — but ...
Larry Diamond -- one of the biggest supporters of the notion that democracy can travel across cultures -- was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq starting in January. No longer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a long story about Diamond's experiences in the field. He's still optimistic about democracy promotion -- but not about Iraq:
Larry Diamond — one of the biggest supporters of the notion that democracy can travel across cultures — was an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq starting in January. No longer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a long story about Diamond’s experiences in the field. He’s still optimistic about democracy promotion — but not about Iraq:
The story of Iraq, this onetime optimist believes, is a tale of missed opportunities. “We just bungled this so badly,” said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We just weren’t honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country.” Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq — lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall, he said, when he contemplated the mess he had left behind. Last Thursday, when it came time for Diamond to return, he did not get on the plane. Instead, he was in his office at the Hoover Tower, disillusioned over the desperate turn of events he had witnessed and what he feels was a country allowed to spin out of control, in large part, he says, because of the Bush administration’s unwillingness to commit a big enough force to protect Iraqis from militias and insurgents. “You can’t develop democracy without security,” he said. “In Iraq, it’s really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don’t get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that.”…. His recommendations for rescuing the situation run counter to some of the policies that the Bush administration insists it will not alter. Diamond said that, in his view, the United States must more than double its current military force of about 135,000 and confront the violent Iraqi militias consistently, while offering political benefits to those who lay down their arms and accept democratic institutions. The best he can say about the prospects in Iraq now is that, as he puts it, “civil war is not inevitable.”
Read the whole thing.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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