Disowning the Mess? It occurs to me that the Democrats might actually prefer to lose this election. Huh?
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I've made the observation here a couple of times that the Democrats are waging such a feeble and ineffectual campaign that it almost seems as tho they don't want to win. Jon Stewart, of Comedy Central's Daily Show, made the same ironic observation after Kerry was asked, for network news cameras, 'If you had known then what you know now, would you have voted for the authorization to use force against Iraq?' Kerry said yes, he would have voted to give the President authority to act! Stewart, puzzled, said something like “He's not even trying!” (to win).
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You know, maybe we’ve hit on something here. Maybe Kerry really does NOT want to win this election, because then he'd be stuck with the terrible mess the Republicans have made of Iraq and the "war on terror". If Kerry & Co. don't have a solution other than simply to walk away, as Nixon just walked away from our South Vietnamese ally and let that government and then the whole of Indochina fall to Communism, maybe they'd rather the Republicans be skewered by that mess, to turn slowly over the flames of religious war fanned by their own rashness and bigotry.
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Maybe the Democrats see a win for the presidency now as a loss for the party long-term , since they just don't have any solutions and would rather the Republicans, who also have no solution, lose the trust of a generation from that mess, than that the Democrats be the ones tarred with the brush of failure.
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Kerry advocates U.S. withdrawal from Iraq by gradually scaling back our presence and replacing American forces with international peacekeepers. But we don’t actually have any guarantee from anyone that they will send in large enuf forces to secure peace, much less democracy across Iraq.
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Nor is there any guarantee that the United States — or anyone — can successfully establish multiparty democracy and a viable democratic mindset in an independent Iraq, given that its culture has never included democracy.
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Remember that Iraq is the oldest civilization on Earth — over 6,000 years of cities, writing, irrigation, and the other hallmarks of advanced human culture. Iraqis may feel that they have managed quite well without democracy thru all that time so don't need it now.
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Unlike the U.S., which was heir to an older (and lesser) democracy on which it could build, Iraq has no ancestors, but is the world’s oldest civilization. It has had kings, emperors, caliphs, sultans, and dictators, but no home-grown democracy, ever, in 6,000 years!
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The only other civilizations even remotely as old as Iraq (or, as it was known before the Arab conquest of 635 A.D., Mesopotamia) are India, China, and Egypt. The Indus Valley civilization arose in what is now Pakistan. Pakistan was given the forms of democracy (as part of British India) by its colonial overlord, but only late in the imperial game. Earlier on, the British were perfectly happy to use existing local monarchies (rajahs, maharajahs and the like) to govern their Indian colonies. Pakistan's feebly entrenched democracy has never lasted very long at a time before some military coup or other overthrew the elected government and installed a strong man.
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Egypt has been governed by democratic forms for only ten years in its entire history, under Anwar Sadat. But Sadat's strong hand was more powerful than the trappings of democracy. After Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists, his successor, Hosni Mubarak, imposed a state of emergency that has been perennially renewed.
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China has never had any form of democracy except in the "breakaway province" of Taiwan. Sun Yat-Sen, who set up the Nationalist government that succeeded the end of the Manchu monarchy, aspired to democracy after a period of "tutelage" of the people in how democracy works. Alas, his times were too tumultuous and too many forces were arrayed against him. He made a terrible mistake in allying early on with the Communists, and when Chiang Kai-shek expelled the Communists from the Nationalist party, open civil war broke out, dooming all hope of democracy on the mainland, which is to this day ruled by Communist totalitarianism.
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In short, none* of the four most ancient civilizations on Earth has ever had democracy, and ancient civilizations don't take kindly to being taught by upstarts. To the extent that democracy is identified with foreign countries and arriviste civilizations, it is resented by keepers of the flame of their own civilization's glories — whether that civilization ever really had a golden age worth cherishing or not.
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Moreover, none of Iraq's neighbors has ever been a democracy either. The closest semblance appears in Israel, which is a democracy for Jews, but dictatorship for everyone else.
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How likely is it, then, that democracy will take root in so hostile a historical, cultural, and geographical clime, no matter how much material and military assistance anyone — we, the European Union, the Arab League, the UN, anyone at all — throws in?
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So maybe the Democratic National Committee thinks it would be better to see the Republicans ravaged by the Iraq War the way the Democrats were ravaged by the Vietnam War — that a new, long-lasting, national majority for the Democrats depends upon deep, widespread public revulsion at a deadly quagmire the Republicans get us into and can't get us out of.
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Perhaps Kerry thinks he can win enuf votes, while still losing the election, to run again four years hence (Hmm. Whatever happened to Al Gore? — who actually got more popular votes than Bush), when the Republicans will have caused thousands more Americans and others to die in unending violence, and cost American taxpayers $400 billion thrown down a Middle East rathole — as might cause fiscal conservatives and jingoistic isolationists appalled by the American death toll in a foreign adventure to turn against the Republican Party and join with traditional Democratic constituencies to create a new Democratic majority in the kind of sea change we have seen with the move of the "solid South" from Democratic to Republican, but in reverse.
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Yes, it might just be that the Democrats really DON'T want to win this time.

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* Only the attenuated Indian extension of the Indus Valley civilization operates under anything like democracy, and the key phrase here is "like democracy", because India is not a social democracy nor economic democracy, and its central government has highhandedly replaced elected state and local governments with appointed governments more to its liking. Besides, there are great discontinuities between the ancient Indus civilization and modern India. The names "India" and "Hindu" may derive from "Indus", but many key elements of Indian culture do not really derive from that ancient civilization but from other, less-ancient cultures.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:02 PM