Was the war worth it?

In a recent article Time magazine asked whether the war in Iraq was worth it.

I was against the war from the beginning because I sensed that the motives behind it weren't right. There seemed to be an ulterior motive behind it and the politicians involved were not being straightforward about it. I didn't trust the characters involved.

It is too soon to tell whether the war in Iraq war was worth it or not. Perhaps in 20 years. I believe in time it will be grudgingly accepted as so.

Was the Vietnam War worth it? Yes, I believe in the long run it was. Vietnam, especially North Vietnam, was an isolationist nation, not wanting to be part of the greater world. That war forced it to open up. Today, Vietnam is one of America's closest associates, in trade and travel. That war also led to America’s rapprochement of China under Richard Nixon, diffusing possible future conflicts in that part of the world.

Wars, history has shown, have facilitated and forged the world's determined path towards globalization. The Iraqi war, in a characteristically perverse way, as the Vietnam war did, is furthering that process. Saddam Hussein was resisting that process by not cooperating with the rest of the world. Hence, to my way of thinking, the war.

It is unfortunate that the present administration in Washington was so deaf to the advice given it by other, advice that could have made the war in Iraq a success. If the troop levels had been higher, as many in the know had insisted, Iraq today may be more settled and secure. If the troops had protected the existing infrastructure of Iraq, like the hospitals, the energy grid, museums, security forces, things would be much easier. But, then, this administration was from the outset inherently incompetent, because neoconservatives were running things, people who are overly ideological and naive.

Francis Fukuyama, of "The End Of History" fame, originally supported the idea of "regime change" in Iraq. However, he soon changed his mind when he saw how inept and poorly the administration was executing the war. His neocon brothers seemed to be out of their depth, not fully examining and understanding the consequences of such a war. They hadn't learned from the past or the first Iraqi war, ignoring it as though it was irrelevant. He recently wrote an article entitled "After Neoconservatism" in which he voiced his concerns about how neocons are running the war and how it will affect future American foreign policy.

Fukuyama recently discussed the intellect of neocons with the French intellect Bernard-Henri Levy. I don't view the neocons aligned with Bush as particularly intellectual or deep thinkers. They tend to be like MBAers (Master of Business Administration), which Bush also happens to be, who don't or can't see the world as multidimensional, who think the world can be improved or corrected with just a few tweaks. (They are suspicious of intellectuals because they see them as cluttering things up.) If they had thought more deeply about Iraq they may have taken a more coherent, sensible approach in trying to establish democracy there. Democracy is contingent on many things. The Bush neocons thought it would be a cakewalk, done with a few broad strokes. (It took the West centuries to develop and try to get it right.) That is why Fukuyama stands apart from his neocon brothers, because he is a more complex thinker. I don't think of him as a neocon in the conventional sense, but as a pragmatist. If Bush and his neocons had practiced pragmatism - a philosophy ideologues like them detest, - the mess in Iraq would probably not exist today.

Unfortunately, Fukuyama may have had a hand in encouraging neocons to think the way they think, with his "end of history" idea. (I tend to agree with his idea). His idea is that the liberal democracy practiced in America and much of the Western world had become the final form of human governance may have wrongly emboldened neocon. He came to that conclusion because liberal democracy was the only form of human governance left standing after it only rival, communism, collapse. It had triumphed over all others form, implying that it was the holy grail of human governance and that its spread shouldn't be impeded To simplistic thinkers like neocons, such an idea was cart blanche. It made them hubristic and cocky in that they thought they could rightly throw America's hegemony around and it would readily be accepted throughout the world, because, as Fukuyama opined, history had fashioned it that way.

Larry Diamond of Stanford University's Hoover institution was quite exited about going to Iraq at the beginning to help establish democracy. He is an expert on Democracy and he was on a mission, a kind of new frontier mission, landing on the moon. He naively thought democracy was doable in Iraq. He soon had his eyes opened and realized that if you don't have security, which Iraq was loosing rapidly, democracy is not possible. He soon returned to America, saddened and disillusioned. Voting alone was not sufficient enough. Democracy needs institutions to uphold it and they would take years to establish In Iraq.

America and the world have been trying to establish democracy in Haiti for years. After ten years things there are not any better there, but worse. That shows how little we know about what generates and keep democracy afloat.

Sadly, in this world, we sometimes have to get things very wrong to eventually get them right. It shows the perverseness of our development and human advancement. There still is no manual in how to establish democracy in countries that have never experienced it before. It still seems to be a secret as to what really makes it work. Democracy is a system that has developed through try and error. That is what America seems to be experiencing in Iraq.