Democracy without America

So I came up with this brilliant title not knowing that Michael Mandelbaum already used it and quite frankly for a really good and mature article too. My initial thinking was that using an army to ameliorate the democratic conditions of a country is the equivalent of rejecting the primacy of liberty and recognizing the people as the sovereign and the highest form of authority. In a best scenario, democracy with America's might will become a collection of "do-gooders" (in the Jacksonian sense) that will have to limit liberty in favor of security neglecting the "competitive" nature of democracy at national and local levels.

Mandelbaum's article was much better! The question for him rooted from the seemingly paradoxical combination of spontaneous spread of democracy in the world contrasted against the failure of US democracy promotion in specific countries: "Why have the deliberate efforts of the world’s most powerful country to export its form of government proved ineffective?". But the real question for him was something else: "Why and how has democracy enjoyed such extraordinary worldwide success despite the failure of these efforts?"
His answer starts at the definition of democracy itself; a combination of liberty and popular sovereignty. Economic liberty implies the inviolability of private property, political liberty connotes the absence of government control of speech, assembly, and political participation and popular sovereignty refers to the tradition that the right to govern belongs not to hereditary monarchs but rather to the people they governed. But the crucial point is that democracy is the combination of these two concepts that protects the freedom of individuals from the government, the majority and special interest groups. Merge of these two concepts has always convinced me of the brilliance of the founding fathers and of course because of a vast available "space" they had an easier time than Europeans moving from a feudalistic regime to a democratic one. Anyway Mandelbaum concludes as a Stanford lecturer did in a speech after occupation of Iraq that "Any country can hold an election, but for an election to be free and fair requires a lot of organization, preparation, and training of political parties, electoral officials, and civil society organizations who monitor the process. "
The real question that Mandelbaum is concerned with is actually more interesting than the first one. He's surprised by the rate at which democracy spread in that last quarter of the century considering that it will take at least one generation for creating the social conditions conductive of liberty. His answer is simple: "The magic of the market"! The key to establishing a working democracy, and in particular the institutions of liberty, has been the free-market economy. Why? Simply because "the institution, skills and values needed to operate a free-market economy are those that,in the political sphere,constitute democracy". This argument alone was convincing for me when I thought about all the debates in Iran as which should take priority, political growth or economic growth. Mandelbaum's answer is neither if you adopt a free-market economy. He goes on to enumerate more arguments supporting his claim:

• Private property, which is central to any market economy, is itself a form of liberty.
• A successfully functioning market economy makes the citizens of the society in which it is established wealthier, and wealth implants democracy.
• The free market generates the organizations and groups independent of the government that are known collectively as civil society, which is itself indispensable to a democratic political system
• The experience of participating in a free-market economy cultivates two habits that are central to democratic government: trust and compromise.

It is easy to see what he would conclude from this analysis: "the best way to foster democracy is to encourage the spread of free markets" and that deliberate promotion of free market is unnecessary due to the fact that "the market will always take care of itself".

Another Campaign of Misinformation

A week ago or so an independent organization published a report that in a nutshell showed how "made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq" (see the full article) and how they "waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation". When I read it I was stunned on how an administration can pull something like this and not only have American's fooled but the whole world. It's things like this that remind us "we really won the cold war" and how America is unchallenged. The article suggests at the end that it remains for us to answer these familiar questions "What did they know, and when did they know it?".
Imagine having read such report and then seeing this story and the actual 60 Minutes where an FBI agent who reported directly to Bush said "It was very important for him to project [that Iraq possessed WMD] because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq". It makes you wonder why such wordings made it to CNN's front page and if we are already in the middle of another campaign of misinformation about the threat of Iran.