Our Iraq failures and a glint of hope

BOOK DETAILS TITLE: Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq AUTHOR: Larry Diamond INFORMATION: Times Books, 369 pp. index, $25

In November 2003 Larry Diamond got the call he had hoped would never come. Condoleezza Rice, who had been his colleague at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University and a personal friend before joining the Bush administration, wanted him to join the U.S. mission in Iraq, as part of the democracy-promotion team.

Although Diamond is not a Republican and had opposed starting the war, he was intrigued. "Having studied, observed, and assisted democracy-building efforts in some 20 countries over the previous two decades," he writes, "I felt I could make a contribution. Yet I also felt that the task was daunting, that the odds were long, and that we had already made a number of profound mistakes in Iraq."

Long story short, Diamond went, he saw, and failed to conquer. He was both inspired and profoundly discouraged and he returned after four months, barely enough time to begin to get to know the country - an all-too-common phenomenon with American sojourners that he pauses to criticize.

Diamond is not opposed to American intervention to promote democracy. Unlike me, he thinks in certain instances it should be our business. He would just like to see it done intelligently in ways that have a chance to succeed. Such a constructive effort was not what he saw in Iraq.

It is almost tiresome to repeat the shortcomings chronicled by so many, but it is interesting to see them elucidated based on personal experience. The military aspect was successful but there was apparently no plan (beyond catching the flowers the Iraqi people threw at us and turning things over to a stable and compliant Iraqi government) for the post-military period. There weren't enough U.S. troops to keep order, which encouraged a growing insurgency. Security got worse and worse, which meant most Americans stayed cooped up in the Green Zone and never got a sense of what Iraq and Iraqis are really like.

Drastic de-Baathification - dumping the army and top civil-service people rather than screening them for real Saddam bitter-enders compared to those who just went along - was a big mistake. Paul Bremer ruled like an autocratic viceroy rather than someone eager to have the Iraqis start handling things. The Coalition often took a position less democratic than that of Iraq's Ayatollah Sistani. And on and on.

When I talked to Diamond a few weeks ago, he remained more hopeful than skeptical about Iraq's eventual future, and some episodes in the book may explain why.

For Diamond, democracy doesn't mean just holding elections, but developing a civil society that supports a culture of democracy that includes political rights, freedom of speech and press and the willingness to relinquish power when your side loses because you don't expect to be oppressed by the temporary majority. When he explained this in large assemblages of Iraqis, he found keen interest, and he inspired lively discussions about the practical problems of building the kinds of institutions that make up a civil society in an Iraq damaged by decades of brutal dictatorship. They will probably be betrayed by their leaders (aren't we all?) but a lot of Iraqis seem to be interested in building a better future. It must have been inspiring to observe this.

"Squandered Victory" outlines the embedded ethnic and demographic problems that go a long way toward explaining why the Iraqis have yet to come up with a final draft of a constitution that all factions can accept. It helps Americans to understand, even as we are appalled by the indecisive U.S. attitude toward Muqtada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric who led demonstrations and insurrections but is now apparently part of the process.

The conclusion is stark: "American political leaders need to take a cold shower of humility: We do not always know what is best for other people, even when we think it is their interest we have in mind."

Has the mess in Iraq insulated us from being manipulated by our leaders next time? One may hope so.