Greg Djerejian has a lengthy but informative post talking about the role of the organized militias (as in “trained and equipped by the U.S. or Britain” organized) in kidnappings and murders. Much is drawn from today’s article in the Washington Post, Militias on the Rise Across Iraq. Both are good reads, as are the comments on GD’s blog. The comment by JEB is also worth reading. Most interestingly:

Where Greg and I disagree — and we have gone round the track on this subject more than once here — is on two points. First, I don’t think he takes sufficiently into account the enormous difficulty in establishing a liberal democracy in any Arab country, and particularly this one. Like him I think the administration has made many lamentable political, military and other mistakes; unlike him I felt from the start that this objective was poorly chosen because even if everything was done right the odds of failure were still very high. In general I think poorly of making vast commitments that can only work out well if someone else does things they have never done before.

I would state this another way… learn from history. When external forces come in to help create democracy, it helps to have countries that already see themselves as a unit. Countries held together by strongmen or by force don’t generally transition to democracies when motivated by external factors. Iraq is a clear case and point of this.

I’m still confused by the President’s pre-war ruminations that some didn’t believe Muslims could be free. Not sure where that was coming from or who was framing it in terms of religion or race or whatever, but if he’s talking about people like JEB who believed that history was against our effort, then perhaps the President was trying to reframe a historical lesson into a racist message. It’s not racist to say that our only successes in nation building have come in countries with long histories or traditions of being a single, internally peaceful country.

Lawrence Kaplan has a good article on the successes of the Bush foreign policy at TNR today. The article I think is the fairest account yet of the successes that this administration has been a part of. From the article:

Both arguments reflect what Georgetown University’s Robert Lieber calls a reductio ad Iraqum, in which every accomplishment or setback of U.S. foreign policy traces back to Iraq. Neither version of events fares well under scrutiny. When democracy blossoms in several different places at once in a region whose political culture hasn’t budged in 60 years, it’s illogical to credit internal forces alone. At the same time, crediting the inspirational effect of Iraq’s elections with events in places as far-flung as Ukraine and Egypt goes too far–and, in slighting the U.S. role as an agent of democracy in every one of them, not far enough.

The best thing about this article is that it covers some of the non-Iraq foreign policy initiatives, detailing the actions that actually followed the democracy rhetoric we hear from Bush all the time. Of course, I end up finishing the article and wonder why we couldn’t have done the same thing in Iraq? This war has become a process that will take decades to finish and in the process has put us in bed with folks like Karimov (see here or here or here). It still doesn’t seem necessary to me, this war… not even the cogent supporters of Bush have convinced me yet.

The foreign policy successes show what can happen with money, diplomacy, and opportunity… no war necessary.