The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11

A dialogue, which is the highest form of communication we know, is always a confrontation of irreducibly different viewpoints. --Octavio Paz
INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE FOG OF WAR
War and Democracy
Since September 11, 2001, the fog of war has enveloped political thought. Bright hopes of perpetual peace and prosperity collapsed in the debris of the World Trade Center. The fog grew thicker with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, as the nations of the Atlantic alliance collided over policy and principle, law and interests. By the time the postwar in Iraq became a civil war and produced more casualties than the war, the dominoes that neoconservatives dreamed would democratize the Middle East were falling helter-skelter into new uncertainties. On the other side of the debate, the most dire antiwar prophecies seemed exaggerated if not hollow, when Iraqis managed to hold elections for the first time in decades. Neither the advocates nor the opponents of the war in Iraq had any sure insights into the uses of war on behalf of democracy. When, by the fall of 2006, the number of Iraqis being killed every month as a result of civil strife exceeded the number of Americans who had been killed in the September 11 attacks that had supposedly justified the invasion of Iraq, American policy was losing its political as well as moral bearings.
Combatants easily lose their sense of direction in the midst of battle, confuse comrade and foe, mistake progress for setback and setback for advantage, and retreat when on the verge of victory or hurl themselves into certain devastation convinced of their invincibility. Nor does war spare political thought from disorientation and uncertainty. Fundamental questions of war and democracy had scarcely begun to emerge into public awareness after September 11 when they were swept up in the whirlwind of preemptive war in Iraq. Among those fundamental questions are:
What role do arms have in a democracy?
How does military power alter, as well as protect, the polity that uses it?
What is the possibility and even the meaning of the international rule of law?
Can force effectively spread liberty and democracy abroad?
The spectacularly successful interventions that overthrew the Taliban and then Saddam Hussein were quickly compromised by the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. A pattern emerged. The United States overestimates the effectiveness of military might and underestimates the ordeal of democracy. Responsibility for the appalling shortcomings of the postwar rebuilding of Afghanistan and Iraq falls squarely on the presidency of George W. Bush--but not exclusively. The crisis runs deeper than any one administration when the world's oldest democracy and sole superpower does not comprehend the wellsprings of democracy or understand the nature of might. Opponents of Bush, neoconservatives, and the Republican Party delude themselves when they are satisfied merely with opposition to administration policy. The fundamental questions of war and democracy are even more difficult to answer today than on September 11, 2001. The threat of terrorism has likely grown rather than shrunk since 2001, and the Middle East has been turned into a laboratory of democracy where any failed experiment risks producing civil war, dictatorship, theocracy, or worse.
Diplomatic and military decisions are prepared and justified by a discourse authored by many hands: historians and ideologues, politicians and journalists, scholars and pundits. A range of discourses, from think-tank manifestos to "Great Power" historiography, from secret reports to presidential speeches, from strategic studies to op-ed pieces, produces the intellectual--but also the symbolic--webbing of the decisions and actions taken in foreign affairs. Since September 11, this symbolic-conceptual webbing has teemed with terms like "lone superpower," "hyperpower," "liberal imperialism," and "progressive interventionism," and slogans like war on terror or power-vs-weakness and Hobbesian-vs-Kantian. All these slogans imply some understanding of power; they all imply, to draw on a distinction made by Hannah Arendt, some understanding of political power and military might. Metaphors as well as ideas are at work in foreign policy discourse, for not only are there conceptions of power--and various methods of analyzing, say, the relative power of states or calculating their interests--but there is also an imagination of power. When it comes to military force no one can truly know how its use will enhance or diminish the power of the state that wields it. Might exists primarily in potential, and therefore it always exists in the imagination.