Strangling Democracy (VACLAV HAVEL, 6/24/04, NY Times)

Zimbabwe’s leaders know that the international community will cooperate with them only if they meet certain conditions. That is why they are trying to give the impression of democracy and thus escape international isolation, and why they distort the standard democratic mechanisms in order to create a semblance of citizens’ participation. At the same time, they create legal instruments that violate human rights. Democratic institutions are partly controlled by the leadership, partly circumvented by it.

A report published this year by the International Crisis Group, an international nonprofit group that works to resolve conflict, showed that many opposition members of Parliament in Zimbabwe have been subject to murder attempts, torture, assault and arrest. In parliamentary elections, President Robert Mugabe nominates 20 percent of members, who then become parliamentarians without a democratic mandate. Elections are regularly accompanied by organized violence and intimidation. The independent judiciary, one of the pillars of democracy, has been severely compromised, with the benches packed with Mr. Mugabe’s supporters.

A law adopted before the presidential elections in 2002 requires journalists to provide detailed information about themselves. If they do not, they will not receive a journalist license. The law, called the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, has been used to close Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper and to arrest people for “suspicion of journalism.” The state now claims a virtual monopoly of written and broadcast media; foreign correspondents, meanwhile, are a thing of the past.

Another law restricts the freedom of association. The government in Zimbabwe has used this law, called the Public Order and Security Act, to stamp out any form of protest, to block practically any public activity of opposition groups. Under this law, women have been arrested for giving out flowers on Valentine’s Day.

The Orwellian names of these laws are both chilling and relevant. Totalitarian regimes may differ in small details — by the nature of their deviations, the degree of their representatives’ contrivance, the degree of their cruelty and brutality — but their nature is the same. And so is the manner of resisting such regimes.

President Bush has shown more interest in Africa than any of his predecessors, but it’s still been too intermittent. If he and Tony Blair made regime change in Zimbabwe as much a focus of world attention as it was in Liberia and Haiti they’d succeed.

Blair bonded with Clinton, but he shares his beliefs with Bush (Rachel Sylvester, 28/06/2004, Daily Telegraph)

[A]s the British and American governments prepare for the handover of power in Iraq on Wednesday, the truth is that when it comes to foreign policy - the area where the transatlantic “special relationship” really counts - Mr Blair actually has far more in common with George W. Bush.

President Clinton was cautious, pragmatic and nationalistic - he prevaricated over Rwanda and refused to send ground troops into Kosovo, declaring himself wary of “missionary zeal” in international affairs.

President Bush is idealistic, moralistic and willing to take risks. Like the Prime Minister, he interprets the world as a fight between good and evil in which his role is zealously to “spread the word” of Western democracy among the unconverted masses. Christianity is not Mr Bush and Mr Blair’s only shared faith.

There are differences between the two men of course - over Guantanamo Bay, climate change and steel tariffs - but their interventionist instincts are the same. When Labour MPs asked the Prime Minister whether he is supporting Mr Bush simply in order to preserve the alliance with the United States, he replied: “I’m afraid it’s worse than that, I actually believe in this war.”

Perhaps Mr Blair is a neo-Conservative. Like several of the Washington advisers and politicians who have such an influence on Mr Bush, the Prime Minister started out on the political Left and has moved to the Right. Like the American neo-cons, he believes that to defend the national interest following September 11 it is necessary to “re-order the world”, even if that means launching pre-emptive military strikes. He argues that, in an age of globalisation of trade and terror, the limits of the nation state need to be redefined. He agrees with the concept of a “new imperialism”, one not of territory but of values, put forward by the former No. 10 adviser Robert Cooper.

Richard Perle, the king of the neo-cons, thinks that the Prime Minister shares his “moral sense” of international affairs. “Oh yes, Tony’s a neo-con,” says one former minister who supported the war. “It’s terrifying. He’s bought the whole idea about remaking the Middle East.”

They’re actually theocons, of course, not neocons.

In Iraq, don’t cut and run. cut and don’t run (Jonathan Rauch, 6/09/04, Jewish World Review)

In an influential Commentary magazine article in 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University professor (she later became U.N. ambassador in the Reagan administration), argued that in Iran and Nicaragua and elsewhere, America’s efforts to democratize authoritarian regimes too quickly had backfired catastrophically in the face of determined insurgencies. “The American effort to impose liberalization and democratization on a government confronted with violent internal opposition not only failed,” she wrote, “but actually assisted the coming to power of new regimes in which ordinary people enjoy fewer freedoms and less personal security than under the previous autocracy — regimes, moreover, hostile to American interests and policies.”

She discerned a pattern. The United States would pressure a friendly authoritarian regime to enter into negotiations “to establish a ‘broadly based’ coalition headed by a ‘moderate’ critic of the regime, who, once elevated, will move quickly to seek a ‘political’ settlement to the conflict.” Alas, it never worked. “Only after the insurgents have refused the proffered political solution and anarchy has spread throughout the nation will it be noticed that the new head of government has no significant following, no experience at governing, and no talent for leadership.” The moderate government collapses, the insurgents win, America faces a new enemy.

The failure, she argued, was based on a fatal U.S. misunderstanding of “how actual democracies have actually come into being.”

Typically, they emerge from “traditional autocracies,” which she distinguished from radical and totalitarian ones. “Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits” of democracy, she said. A traditional autocracy, provided it is reasonably friendly to the U.S. and poses no threat to its neighbors, may look ugly, but it can provide the stability that incubates democracy.

In only two modern countries was democracy imposed quickly and successfully from outside: West Germany and Japan, both after World War II. Many more cases have followed Kirkpatrick’s model of liberalization within an authoritarian, but not totalitarian, regime. As if to underscore the point, Russia recently tried to leap straight to multiparty democracy and failed. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia now appears to be moving through a phase of authoritarian consolidation, from which, the West can only hope, real democracy might yet emerge. […]

In an interview, Kirkpatrick, now at the American Enterprise Institute, said, “We need to set the bar within the realm of the possible. We need to face the fact that [Iraqis] have absolutely no experience with democracy.”

The trouble with such realism is that it may be unrealistic.

Given the amount of rhetorical capital Bush has invested in his call to make Iraq a democratic beachhead in the Middle East, settling for even a moderate autocracy might come off as a surrender. The world would hoot at America’s enthronement of “Saddam lite.” And could America’s troops really just stand aside with a shrug if an Iraqi Putin or Pinochet began closing newspapers and arresting enemies?

But realists have three strong rejoinders. First, a Putinized or Pinocheted Iraq, however flawed, would be much better than a Saddamized one. Second, Iraq would be constantly prodded from inside and outside toward genuine democracy, and would probably arrive there within a generation. Third, for outsiders to indefinitely prop up and micromanage a dysfunctional government in an unstable environment may work, sort of, in a tiny place like Kosovo, but it cannot work in Iraq.