Iraq: The Long-Term View

As U.S. mid-term elections approach, politicians of all stripes are arguing about Iraq. They're debating the decisions of four years ago and offering starkly different views of what's happening there now. But the more important questions concern Iraq's longer-term future. Is the country doomed to forever swing between tyranny and instability? Or can it become a durable Arab democracy?

You can learn a lot about a country by looking at the relationship between its stability and its "openness." Stability is a measure of the extent to which a country's government can weather a political, economic or social crisis. Openness is a measure of the degree to which people, ideas, information, goods and services flow freely in both directions across a state's borders and within the country itself.

In an open state, citizens can make an international telephone call, use the Internet and travel abroad without restriction. They have access to reliable information about events elsewhere in the country and are free to discuss them publicly. By contrast, the government of a closed state does not recognize these freedoms as rights.

Some countries (the United States, Germany, Japan and many others) are stable because they are open. Other states (North Korea, Cuba, Iran and others) are stable because they are closed. In each of these closed states, a small governing elite has isolated the country's citizens from the outside world and from one another. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was stable because it was closed. President Bush hopes the new Iraq will be stable because it is open.

Imagine a graph on which the vertical axis measures a state's stability and the horizontal axis measures its openness. Each nation appears as a data point on the graph. Taken together, these data points produce a pattern very much like the letter J. Nations higher on the graph are more stable; those lower are less stable. Nations to the right of the dip in the J are more open. Those to the left are less open.

For a country on the closed left side of the curve to move to the open right side, it must pass through the dip in the J -- a period of dangerous instability. In the early 1990s, South Africa, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia each descended into this dip. South Africa re-emerged on the right side of the J curve as an open post-apartheid state. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia came apart and ceased to exist.

Right-side states have a collective interest in helping to shepherd authoritarian left-side states through the unstable dip in the curve toward a stability that is sturdier because it is based on openness. The Bush administration hopes to achieve just this kind of transition in Iraq.

In the spring of 2003, the United States pushed Iraq into the dip in the J curve. The shape of the curve expresses why the country's future is now so uncertain. One state can drive another into the dip, but it cannot drag it up the right side of the curve. The United States can try to guarantee Iraq's security as it begins the climb, but Iraq must make the climb for itself. U.S. officials essentially wrote the postwar Japanese constitution, but it was the Japanese people who breathed life into the institutions that created a new and more open Japanese society.

When a people face the daily uncertainties of life in any unstable country, as millions of Iraqis now do, they value stability above all. Freedom from gunfire or hunger trumps the freedom to open a newspaper.

During the chaotic Yeltsin years, Russians experienced considerable economic and social turmoil. Beginning in 2000, Vladimir Putin restored the country's stability by concentrating political power in the Kremlin, curbing free expression in the country's media and consolidating economic power in the hands of the state. This re-imposition of order has earned Putin a 70-plus percent approval rating, evidence that millions of Russians have happily voted their country back up the left side of the J curve. Some in Washington are left to wonder, "Who lost Russia?"

Simply said, no one wants to be in the dip in the curve, and the path up the left side offers a quicker way out. It's a lot easier to quickly restore order by declaring martial law (moving the country up the left side of the curve) than by making the institutions of government more transparent (moving the country to the right).

Building a stability that is based on openness requires a long-term commitment of financing, political capital, faith and confidence.

But the Bush administration did not adequately prepare the American people to make such an enormous commitment. It's a little late for the president to ask the U.S. public for an open-ended commitment now. The administration's long list of rosy projections -- Americans will be greeted as liberators, the insurgency is in its last throes -- have undermined public confidence in its credibility.

Iraq's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds can only make the slow climb up the right side of the J curve with a long-term commitment of considerable political, economic, diplomatic and military resources from the United States. The American people will not support such a commitment.

Without it, Iraqis will demand near-term stability and support anyone who can credibly promise to protect them from their sectarian enemies.

The United States may soon find itself in the uncomfortable position of supporting another authoritarian regime in Iraq simply because it can prevent the country from becoming an al-Qaida training camp or an Iranian satellite. Some may soon be asking, "Who lost Iraq?"

The Bush administration finds itself in this position because it ignored one of the fundamental lessons of the J curve: it's one thing to destabilize an isolated authoritarian state; it's quite another to transform it into a country in which political and social stability is grounded in the free flow of ideas, information, trade and people.

That's something that Iraqis will one day have to do on their own.