Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [268]
[I]t would be a terrible mistake to think that Iraq is a fully secure, fully pacified environment. It is not. It is dangerous. There are people who are rolling hand grenades into compounds. There are people that are shooting people. And it’s not finished. So we ought not to leave the world with the impression that it is.12
I had another issue with the President’s remarks. “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort,” Bush had said. “Our coalition will stay until our work is done.” That was not the way I understood our plan. A nation that had suffered under decades of dictatorial rule was unlikely to quickly reorganize itself into a stable, modern, democratic state. Deep sectarian and ethnic divisions, concealed by a culture of repression and forced submission to Saddam, lurked just below the surface of Iraqi society.
I hoped Iraq would turn toward some form of representative government, but I thought we needed to be clear-eyed about democracy’s prospects in the country. Even the United States, though it had been the heir of hundreds of years of British democratic political development, did not evolve smoothly or quickly into the liberal democracy that we benefit from today. Millions of African Americans were considered property for more than seventy-five years after our country’s founding. Women couldn’t vote until nearly one hundred and fifty years after independence from England. I was concerned that the President’s remarks suggested that the United States might remain until Iraq had achieved democratic self-sufficiency which might take decades. I doubted whether the American people would have the patience for a protracted, multiyear occupation as Iraqis fumbled their way along the road toward something approximating a free, nondictatorial government. And I assumed the Iraqi people would be even less willing to put up with a long American occupation, which could become a rallying point for rebellion.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “[T]he central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.”13 A millennia-old culture dating to the very beginnings of civilization would have to work its way toward adopting practices we considered democratic gradually. The art of compromise, which is central to a successful democracy, is not something that people learn overnight. If we hurried to create Iraqi democracy through quick elections, before key institutions—a free press, private property rights, political parties, an independent judiciary—began to develop organically, we “could end up with a permanent mistake—one vote, one time—and another Iran-like theocracy,” as I wrote in a May 2003 memo.14
I conveyed these thoughts to the President and to Rice, suggesting the administration soften the democracy rhetoric. I proposed that we talk more about freedom and less about democracy, lest the Iraqis and other countries in the region think we intended to impose our own political system on them, rather than their developing one better suited to their history and culture.15
I wondered as well how we would define democracy if that became our goal. If Iraq never created an American-style system of government, would that mean that our mission had been a failure or that the troops would have to stay indefinitely? Emphasis on Iraqi democracy invited critics of the war to find the innumerable instances in which Iraq would inevitably fall short. Further, Iraq’s neighbors, our regional partners, who would be important to our efforts to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq, were less than enthusiastic about our emerging posture. In fact, the reason so many countries supported us, and the reason two successive U.S. presidents and the Congress of the United States supported regime change in Iraq, was because of the consistent emphasis on the security threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Bringing democracy to Iraq had not been among the primary rationales.
It was hard to know exactly where the President’s far-reaching