TIME.com: The Condi Doctrine -- Aug. 15, 2005 -- Page 5

TIME.com: The Condi Doctrine -- Aug. 15, 2005 -- Page 5
This article in Time about Condi Rice pushes the notion that democratic reform has to be timid and methodical in places that have never known democracy. (UPDATE: Powerline comments on the same article.)

This is lunacy. Government change in small increments is bound to be hijacked by bureaucrats or despotic tendencies. The one part of the lunacy of Marxism that is true is that government change must be revolutionary.

It must work quickly and throw the baby out with the bath water. Then building institutions can be slow and methodical.

What modern, successful democracy did not start suddenly and take years to get its feet under them? Compare the democracies that we are always fearing will collapse to a military junta.

For democracy to take hold and work, the revolutionaries must throw out the old guard from top to higher middle management. This inevitably means several years of poor management. Shake raw milk. It takes time for the cream to surface.

The building of a system of government works from ideals to bureaucracy. Working the other way -- from bureaucracy to ideals -- means that those who can find power through milking the system will control the bureaucracy. This is dangerous. It is this power stealing process that leads to juntas. The bureaucracy with the guns gets fed up with a feable system. Unfortunately, this often fails because the military's strict control system does not lead to good democracy.

It is the street revolutions that work. The chaos of the masses insisting on good government. The chaos of constitutional conventions that insist on principled government. The implementation through the chaotic first parliament or congress. The implementation through oversight of the brand-new bureaucracy. The law of averages in the pendulum swing.

Everyone is uneasy. Everyone is seeking power and control simultaneously. In the military juntas, power at the top is already guaranteed by gunpoint. The rest of the bureaucracy is seeking its power without much citizen input or restriction.

Now this chaotic transformation has one guaranteed result: the pendulum swing. The Brent Scowcrofts of the world don't fear the pendulum swinging away from their collective noses. They fear its return. They fear the bloodied nose. Here the General and its adherents have defined victory incorrectly. They need to move their nose out of the path of the returning pendulum.

Think about it. If you define your success as making every democracy your ally, when a new government arises that does not agree with you, you have failed. In the Cold War this Kennansian view may have made sense.

If you define victory as building a democracy that later may have a Chancellor Schroeder, how can you have failed when the Chancellor gets thrown out on his ear after a few, peaceful years militarily even if they are a diplomatic nightmare. The Chancellor is removed by his own people. The pendulum swing moves toward the party historically more friendly to the US.

In Iraq, we must admittedly fear the first few pendulum swings. The fear should not be of the Kenansian variety. We should fear that the Iraqi version of the Articles-of-Conferation period or the Iraqi Yeltsin-era not being able to survive to the next pendulum swing. We should not fear the chaos for sake of fearing an unknowable future.

We should fear that the patience of the Iraqi people leads to a knee-jerk revolution against democracy because of their fear of chaos -- even explosive chaos. (Trust me, my fear of explosive chaos would rationalize such a knee-jerk response if I lived in Iraq now.) But it is in such chaos that true democratic strength arises.

Condi has shown confidence in the democratic process. She is right to do so. A successful Iraqi democracy will produce a Iraqi Chancellor Schroeder. I don't doubt sooner than later. The question is not who is the country's leader at any moment. It is what system is necessary for that difficult leader to be removed. If it is by the ballot box or by constitutional limitations, the who is irrelevant. (I mean the top dog, not the puppet, in the Iranian style.)

The pendulum's swing must always pass through the bottom of its swing. As long as the swing always stays centered on a democratic system, over time the pendulum will swing in slower, shorter arcs. These shorter arcs is where we build our true allies.

Radicalism is merely the attempts to push the pendulum out of its swing to the middle. Someone like Venezula's Chavez is dangerous because he pushes the pendulum wide of its natural swing. The swinging is in wider, eratic, circular swings. This is the real danger of getting a blood nose. You have to stand much farther away. When the swinging becomes smaller and more focused on one path, you can stand closer to the pendulum and never get a bloody nose.

The Scowcroft method by comparison is to have some group hold the pendulum with the hope that they will slowly set it in the middle. This is folly. The middle is not defined by one person. An attempt to have one person find the middle just means that a new person holds the pendulum or the holder is moving around.

Being able to predict the pendulum's movement is more like having a circle of people each pushing the pendulum. If each person gets a chance to push the pendulum, there is less need to push the pendulum excessively hard. Build the pendulum and let it swing. Focus on limiting the arc, not setting still.