An Invitation and Feedback

In This Issue:

  1. Invitation – Iraq Roundtable on the Hill
  2. Feedback: Democracy Overseas as a U.S.Goal
  3. A Leg Up on Tragic Choices in Foreign Policy
  4. Meeting Announcements

1. Discussion Invitation

The Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies will host a discussion of community-based security in Iraq. The invitation to participants follows; the event is open to the public.

This is to invite you to participate in a discussion of “Plan Z: Community Based Security in Iraq,” to take place in the DirksenSenateOfficeBuilding, room 419, on June 18, 2007. The meeting will begin punctually at 2:00PM and is expected to close at 4:00PM. The meeting is hosted by Senator Biden, who will participate if his schedule allows; he will also be represented by Antony Blinken, Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Congressional staff, the media, and the public are invited.

We are asking you and a select handful of others to participate in the meeting – rather than present a paper or deliver a lecture – in order to allow for maximum time for open discussion of the plan outlined in the enclosed document. The issue is not whether relying for security in each region of Iraq, and parts of cities, primarily on the armed forces of the particular ethnic or confessional community living in these areas, is the best or second best option, but whether it is less worse than other options realistically available. The meeting will close with a vote to assess the participants’ basic support for the suggested approach.

The Community Based Security position paper is a communitarian adaptation of an idea laid out as early as 2003 by Leslie Gelb and championed by Senator Biden, among others. These and other sources are fully cited and credited in the enclosed document. The position paper’s adaptation draws on Security First: For A Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, to be published by Yale University Press in June this year (

Space is limited. Please RVSP to Kelly Makowiecki by email at . If you have additional questions please call Kelly Makowiecki at 202-994-8190.

2. Feedback From the Past Issue

In the previous Communitarian Letter we posed the question to our readers:

For decades, America’s role in the world has been summarized as promoting freedom, democracy and human rights. Following the failures of forced regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, many now question this mission. Still others hold that if the U.S. were to promote democracy in nations such as Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the result would be even more oppressive, Taliban-like regimes that would promote terrorism and be hostile to American interests. Should the U.S. continue to promote democracy overseas? Should it center its endeavors around some other goals? Or should it simply stick to its own knitting?

We compiled the responses and share a range of opinions with you:

Rick Wicks, writing from Göteborg, Sweden says:

Sen. John McCain gave a remarkable speech recently at the Hoover Institution at Stanford ( on the need for a common structure – a League of Democracies – to work out common solutions to common problems facing democracies worldwide. He points out that some of our important allies – Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, who all have forces serving alongside ours in Afghanistan – are not in NATO, and yet should be included in some common policy-making structure. But we face non-military problems as well, such as global warming, human rights violations in Darfur (Sudan), the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, tyrants in Burma and Zimbabwe, nuclear proliferation in Iran, democracies needing support in Ukraine and Serbia. The United Nations, with all due respect, is often hamstrung in dealing with such problems because of vetoes from China and/or Russia. A League of Democracies could act as a beacon – just as the European Union has done for Eastern Europe – calling countries to strengthen their democratic credentials so as to participate. As McCain says, this is not a Republican vision (I happen to be a Democrat), it is an American vision. “This is not idealism…, it is the truest kind of realism.”

Dave Erwin writes:

America seems to be very energetic about human rights, butonly in those places where it could be suggested we might hold a "whiphand", and that we might be successful.
Where are sincere Republican OR Democratic efforts, in the Congress ORthe Presidency, to improve the level of human rights in China, NorthKorea, or Cuba, for starters?
I think we like to talk human rights, but not act human rights, exceptin places where we can throw around our weight and "maybe" have somesuccess, but not where we have apple carts to upset if we act asseriously as we talk.
Why don't we do something about what SHOULD beconsidered a human right in America, and that is the right to access toaffordable health care for every American citizen and person who islegally in this country. (Too bad, ILLEGAL immigrants, but if you don'thave good luck here, go back to your country of citizenship.) It wouldseem the national politicians don't care that infant mortality in 6Southeastern states has risen dramatically in the last several years,due in part to the fact that people have no right to affordable access toour health care system.
The old adage "charity begins at home" could just as easily state "humanrights begins at home".

From Margaret Stout, Ph.D:

It seems to me that there is only one way to promote democracy if it is understood as self-governance: by example. Isn't this the lesson shared by virtually all of the world's religious and spiritualleaders as well? We promote freedom by ensuring freedom within our own jurisdiction and not using any form of domination toward others. We promote self-governance by ever improving our own ability to govern ourselves, and providing exemplary practices for others. We promote human rights by not infringing upon anyone's within or beyond our borders. All together, we promote these traits in others bychoosing not to engage in activities like trade that will benefit those who deny their own or other people's freedoms, rule by oppression, or abuse human rights. This is not the Unites States"sticking to its own knitting." It isleading by both example and conscientious action in what I see as the original intent of our role as a world leader. Becoming the oppressor toward any purported outcome flies in the face of all of these values. Self-governance simply cannot be forced--it must emerge from a people themselves.

Allen Barton writes in to say:

Steven Kull of the Program on International Policy Attitudes just presentedto the House Committee on Foreign Affairs the results of a survey ofattitudes toward the United States and Al Qaeda in the Muslim world.Overwhelming majorities of citizens in the Muslim world believe that theU.S. government is hostile to Islam, is trying to weaken and divide theIslamic world, and should withdraw its forces from Islamic countries. From
half to 90% approve of attacks on US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and thePersian Gulf. About 1/3 feel positive toward Osama bin Laden, perceiving himas a force standing up to America, although only 1/7 approve of attacks oncivilians to achieve political goals.
This is the bitter fruit of Bush and his senior advisors' imperial vision.The sympathy and acceptance of the UN-supported military interventionagainst Al Qaeda and its Taliban supporters has been swept away by Bush'sunilateral war against Iraq, his schemes to implant U.S. bases around theMiddle East, and his administration's loose talk about U.S. sponsored"regime change" in countries he doesn't like. The Bush administration's long
involvement in supporting the Israeli expansionist policy in the occupiedterritories - and the influence of "Likudniks" in his administration -strengthens the longstanding Muslim hostility over our Israel policy.

This climate of opinion makes it absurd for the U.S. to think that it can "export democracy" to Muslim countries. And it is questionable what kind ofdemocracy is possible as long as intense religious belief dominates thepolitical culture; compromise and freedom are ruled out by the absolutevalues of traditional religion of any kind.

Judy Jensvold of Ithaca, NY writes:

We are not promoting democracy overseas. Forcing democracy has long been questioned. A number of people, including political leader William Jennings Bryan and intellectual Goldwin Smith, opposed the U.S. war on thePhilippines and the occupation, which lasted until after WWII, as clearly imperialism and a betrayal of our republican ideals.

As Goldiwn Smith wrote in Commonwealth or Empire (1902) "Shall the American Republic be what it has hitherto been, follow its own destiny, and do what it can to fulfill the special hopes which humanity has founded on it; or shall it slide into an imitation of European Imperialism, and be drawn ... into a career of conquest and domination over subject races, with the political liabilities which such a career entails.... Seldom has a nation been brought so distinctly as the American nation now is to the parting of they ways."

We made the wrong choice in the McKinley era, which is so similar to now, and turned our back on our republican heritage and became an imperial power. We cloaked this in good intentions, like bringing democracy.

The Bush Administration came up with democratization as a reason for our imperial behavior when getting rid of Saddam and WMD proved false or insufficient reasons. It is a way to sell the imperial ambitions of the power elites to the American people. If democracy is what our activity in Iraq is all about, why are we so cozy with Saudi Arabia? (They let us have oil pretty much on our terms.) Why is China granted "favored nation" status in trade deals? ( They'll produce cheap products for us and finance of debt.) Shouldn't we be democratizing them to? No need, as they largely play to the power elites economic interests.

If we truly wanted democracy in Iraq we would not now be dictating the outcome to the Iraqi Hydrocarbon (Oil) Bill that has caused some much turmoil and gets close to no mention in the U.S. press.

If Western companies get access to Iraq's formerly nationalized oil, that's not democratization, it's imperialism. As of about a week ago a search of the New York Times turned up only three mentions of the proposed oil law. Only one article, a guest column, contained more than a cursory reference. And this is our national newspaper "of record."

Andy Blunden says:

The egocentric nature of Americans really puzzles non-Americans, you know. Are you kdding? US armies, air forces, navies, spies and assassins have killed, maimed, poisoned, deposed and sabotaged elected popular governments for a couple of hundred years, imposed dictatorships reliant on torture, brought whole countries under the control of private US companies, tried to drive countries back to the stone age so, all in the service of making money for a small section of the US population. No-one outside your shores believes this nonsense about "America's role promoting freedom, democracy and human rights". Are you kidding? Why do you think billions of people hate America? Just leave other countries alone.

Mark J. Heyrman of the Edwin F. Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of Chicago adds:

America faces two seriousproblems whenever it goes abroad to intervene in other countries: (1) We have a long history of deception and self-deception about our motives; and (2) whether ornot we have been honest with ourselves and others about our motives, the overwhelming perception among a huge portion of the world population is that theUnited States does not intervene for benign purposes, but rather for purposes which are either evil or ill-advised or both.

Of course the war in Iraq is a perfect example of both of these problems. Only after other explanations proved implausible did we claim thatwe were there to sow the seeds of democracy.Even if true,hardly anyone in Iraq or the rest of the Middle East believes this.Indeed, one could imaginethat an outsideinvasion might have resulted in a stable democracyif it had been undertaken by any countrywhich did not have our horriblereputation.

Unfortunately, the very way in which the question is posed suggests that at some point in world history the United States had as a major (or even not so major) goal spreading democracy to other countries. There is simply no evidence for this. We have regularlyintervened to overthrowdemocracies which we did not like and wehave reliably failed to supportdemocratic movements. We overturned the democratically elected government of Chile to install our puppet Pinochet, we installed the brutal dictator the Shah in Iran andwe tried to overturn the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, toname just a few examples. Or consider the case of ayoung patriot named HoChi Minh, whosenumber one hero was George Washington. Hoapproachedus to help liberate Vietnam from French colonialism. Only when we refused did Ho turn to Communist countries for their help. Even in Iraq, with the whole world watching and doubtful of our motives, we tried to influence the democratic elections by giving money to our favorite candidates.

So we cannot abandon our efforts to democratize the world because we have not made any such efforts.

Unfortunately, due to our failure to appreciate the complexities of the world and other cultures, our oversees adventures ostensibly designed to make us more secure, have been similarly inept and counter productive. In our zeal to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan we helped to fund and arm the Taliban and Al Queda. In our zeal to have a military presence in South Asia we helped to create the dictatorship in Pakistan which is (a) threatening the security of democratic India (not surprising we prefer the dictatorship in Pakistan to the democracy in India), (b) selling nuclear technology to Iran; (3) training radical Moslem revolutionaries to prop up the Taliban in Afghanistan (4) harboring Osama Bin Laden. In South America we have done everything in our power to strengthen the hand of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

There are some simple solutions which will reduce the risk of war in the world and increase our security:

1) Withdraw all US troops from the more than 30 countries we are now occupying.

2) Pass a constitutional amendment which prevents US troops from going abroad unless they are under the complete command and control of an international agency such as the United Nations or are responding to adirect attack on the territory of the United States.

Only if we understand that the number one threat to world peace is the United States will we take effective steps to bring peace to the world.

It is possible to change. Throughout the first half of the 20th Century Germany had a deservedly bad reputation for aggression (and of course the Holocaust). Now few view Germany as a threat to peace. If we commit ourselves to change, it is possible that 50 years from now the US will be correctly seen as a force for good in the world. But we must learn that: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way" A.J. Muste

Fred Foldvary ofSanta ClaraUniversity says:
Democracy has not failed. What has failed is shamelections, where ballots are cast, but there thecandidates and options are pre-selected by anundemocratic process. True democracy has to becommunitarian, beginning with the local neighborhood. When residents elect a local community council, theycan know the candidates personally, and activists canbe elected with little or no money. Higher levelgoverning councils are then elected from lower levelcouncils. A communitarian democracy would trulyrepresent the people rather than elites who manipulateballoting in the name of democracy.

Harry A. Shamir, President of the R&DA Company of Plymouth, MA notes:

The real problem with the American ideology of the "religion of freedom", is that it is uniquely an American construct, based on American history and of its constituent ethnic components, and heavily modified by the events since WWII, including the 60's. Inasmuch as we Americans push it on the rest of the world, we are seen not as liberators, but as oppressors. Hence to spread our ideology requires all the finesse of politicians seeking votes and marketers seeking sales. This is not a task for soldiers. Soldiers we need to apply as the solution to problems requiring force as the only alternative.Iraq was not such a problem.Afghanistan and alQayda indeed were such a problem.

Local marketing and local politics need to be the way to accomplish our sale of "Americanism". Geared to local minds and hearts and problems, then and only then will our ideology stand a chance at winning its due place in the world marketplace of ideas that work. This is also Mr. William Langewiesche's point.

The byproduct of such activities will be the advancement of American interests. True American interests, not just dominance - an adolescent's dream that has ceased working since the invention of gunpowder.

The natural outcome of such activitieswill bethe expansion of global reach communitarian organizations, eventually one day to coalesce into some form of world government. That is true planetary democratization.

Refusal to admit that no one ideology (or religion, which is also an ideology) fits all, is an attitude that is itself doomed in a global society, and dooming all too many people to misery and early death.