Newswise — Barnard College political scientist Demetrios James Caraley has edited a collection of essays by nine influential scholars that examines the "Bush Doctrine," the Iraq war, and the implications for democracy in the Middle East. In the foreword, Caraley writes that "there is no evidence yet that even if a new democratic Iraq can be established, it will serve as a 'beacon' of democracy and freedom in the Middle East."
American Hegemony: Preventive War, Iraq, and Imposing Democracy includes essays by Samuel P. Huntington and Joseph Nye of Harvard; Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek magazine; Robert Jervis of Columbia, and other leading scholars who are at the center of the debate over "American empire."
In the foreword, Caraley writes that the United States, as the sole remaining superpower , is not invincible or irresistible. "The view of the United States as the world's sole remaining superpower seemed to be confirmed by its quick and easy victory over Iraq's organized military forces. Once again, it was also confirmed that American superpower is primarily the power to destroy and, at the extreme, to create chaos but not necessarily to assure compliance with its will, even after it proclaimed military victory."
Caraley is the Janet Robb Professor of the Social Sciences at Barnard, professor of international and public affairs at Columbia, and Editor of Political Science Quarterly. He has published numerous books and articles on national security policy, including The Politics of Military Unification, The New American Interventionism, and September 11, Terrorist Attacks, and U.S. Foreign Policy.
In his latest work, he asserts that "the Iraqi war proved only that U.S. military superiority can be guaranteed against small states that lack nuclear weapons, and even that does not guarantee that after victory over a state's military forces, there will be compliance by the defeated state and opposition attacks will stop," Caraley warns that the United States cannot succeed militarily when "going it alone." The U.S. relied on using military bases and receiving overflight permissions from many of it traditional allies in NATO and on the Arab peninsula despite their strong opposition to the war. Moreover, "how responsibly the United States chooses to exercise its superpower affects the deference and respect that it will be accorded by other nations and international organizations," requiring the careful exercise of American unilateralism.
Also according to Caraley, U.S. military interventions against rogue states and tyrannies will not necessarily result in the rise of democracies. "There is as yet no evidence," he writes, "that even if a new democratic Iraq can be established, it will serve as a 'beacon' of democracy and freedom in the Middle East, resulting in the people of other nondemocracies in the region demanding democracies of their own." Moreover, the overly optimistic approach to the Iraqi invasion, which assumed that a pro-Western democracy supportive of U.S. policies would be successfully imposed and that this new Iraqi democracy would become a pillar of security for the U.S. in the Middle East, has proven to be a mirage.
Considering the wide range of powers given to the attorney general right after the attacks of September 11 by the USA PATRIOT Act and then Congress' hasty abdication of its constitutional rights, without sufficient debate and deliberation, upon transferring to the president the power to decide whether and when the U.S. would go to war against Iraq, Caraley believes that we may be weakening the constitutional democracy at home. He furthers states that "if how the U.S. went to war in 2003 against Iraq becomes accepted as a legitimate precedent"¦any president could find misleading and allegedly very confidential intelligence with which to frighten Congress into giving him some authority for using the military against 'terrorism' (or even worse, claim that he could do so on his own, as part of his inherent power as Commander in Chief)."
Lastly, Caraley questions what is ahead and affirms that "the United States cannot leave Iraq before it has a stable government that can provide good internal security and some capacity to protect itself against foreign foes." However, even with the U.S.'s presence in Iraq, there has been a failure to squelch violence not only against coalition armed forces but also against foreign contractors, ethnic and religious factions, major Shiite mosques, hotels, and Iraqi police stations and police training facilities. He hopes that the United States might learn not to embark on war so rapidly when the threat to the U.S. is remote in time and place, the intelligence reports are murky and inconclusive, the cost of the war is substantial, and the international community fails to see the threat and thus refuses to provide support.
The collection, published by the Academy of Political Science (http://www.psqonline.org), includes an introduction by Walter LaFaber of Cornell; "Understanding the Bush Doctrine" by Robert Jervis; "Deciding on War Against Iraq: Institutional Failures" by Louis Fisher of the Library of Congress; "Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War" by Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, PIPA, of the University of Maryland; "After Saddam: Regional Insecurity, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Proliferation Pressures in Postwar Iraq" by Andrew Flibbert, of New York University; "Limits of American Power" by Joseph S. Nye Jr. of Harvard; "The Rise of Europe, America's Changing Internationalism, and the End of U.S. Primacy" by Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University; "How Countries Democratize" by Samuel P. Huntington, and "Islam, Democracy, and Constitutional Liberalism" by Fareed Zakaria.
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