"Mugged by Reality"

Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions on CSPN's Book TV. It was very good, and I suggest that if you have the chance you tune in.

Agresto is a distinguished educator who has worked a great deal in Iraq since the invasion, trying to revive and strengthen the system for higher education in that country. He stresses that the invaders did not understand Iraqi culture and failed to predict the outcome of their actions. He notes, however, that even most Iraqis did not understand the depth of religious warfare that would be unleashed in the last four years.

Most of the talk was devoted to the political dimension of American intervention. He suggests that there are good and bad versions of majority government. Liberal democracy, as practiced in the United States and Western Europe (and other places) is the good version; the reign of terror in France after the French Revolution serves as an example of the bad version. Agresto reminds us that the founding fathers of American democracy had read their Latin and Greek sources, knew that they were trying to create a system that most of their contemporaries thought was doomed to failure, and worked very hard to create a set of institutions that would allow democracy to function well -- the famous checks and balances of the American Constitution, as well as the evolutionary process embodied in that Constitution. The people of the English colonies of North America had a strong civic culture and 200 years experience of relatively democratic local self government when the Constitution was written, and Agresto suggests that the way a people think is as important as the political institutions that they build in empowering a good democracy.

Agresto says the question is whether people want to be free is the wrong question. The right question is whether they want all their fellow citizens to be free.

The policy makers responsible for the Iraq invasion and post-invasion Coalition Authority apparently thought in terms of the myth of American (and English) democracy, not the historical reality. They apparently ignored the historical realities of the Civil Wars in the United States and England that demonstrated just how hard it had been to achieve their liberal democratic systems. They seem to have assumed that the relatively-strong, secular, middle class of Iraq would quickly achieve a workable democracy if relieved of the dictatorial weight of Saddam Hussein's government. They were clearly wrong.

I wonder about the processes that are unleashed by revolution in a country that has been under totalitarian government and that has not developed a national civic culture over generations. Are the communist takeovers in Russia and China or the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain not warning posts, like that of the French Revolution?

Agresto, as one would expect from the former president of St. Johns College in Santa Fe, thinks historically. He sees a couple of centuries of religious warfare in Europe, which resulted eventually in an exhausted willingness to allow people their own beliefs. Islam has not had a comparable experience in the last millenium. Agresto suggests that the 21st century will be again a century of religious wars.

I wonder whether he is right. Is the conflict in the Gulf really between Christianity and Islam or Shiite and Sunni? Or is it over the control of oil, and the people who live where the oil is found and the people whose economies depend on using that oil. It is a conflict over the division of the benefits from the oils between the producing and the consuming societies?

Given the rate of growth of the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and their already energetic pursuit of resources to continue that growth, is not the 21st century likely to be most marked by economic conflict between the existing economic powers and the emerging ones? Let us hope that if so, that that conflict is conducted through peaceful negotiations rather than force of arms!