The Nonsense of Spreading Democracy

In the news this morning, looking bad in the papers and upsetting civilians at their breakfast, came reports from the vast meat grinder of the Middle East (all new recipe, now with added Libya!) Gaddafi is apparently about to get his head kicked in by the heroic Rebel Alliance supported by the occasional friendly missile lobbed over from Italy, while east of Suez, the Assad's minions are taking the fight to the Syrian rebels in no uncertain terms. Over all this, the "civilised" EU and United States occasionally condescend to wheeze ineffectually at the overlords of these places. Still, important to show solidarity with the oppressed masses, eh?

Of course it's not.

I didn't see hordes of newly liberated Iraqis charging over to give the rioters a damn good bit of what for a couple of weeks ago, and neither do I expect to see grateful Libyans weeping at the godlike munificence of NATO for sending some aeroplanes and ships to obliterate a war machine fighting with sixty year-old weapons. Just like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, the captivating saga of the Middle-East peace process, and now Libya, I am reasonably certain that Western sabre-rattling will be followed up with a bomb or several in Syria to support the people we suddenly care about there, and the outcome will be the same: a lot of soldiers with sand in their underwear, a few dead, and an admission of ultimate failure, all for the bargain price of more than a trillion dollars.

So why do we care at all? Well, there's a goodish lake of oil under the deserts at the unfashionable end of the Mediterranean, but that's not it, or there'd be a Saudi-Arabia-shaped whole in the world by now. I suspect it's more to do with the fact that developed Western nations all really would quite like some nice big empires again, but are stymied by a lefitsh concern who delude themselves that many parts of the world are acutally better off without us. The only thing left to do then is to go and show off our big shiny penises guns and tanks by pretending to liberate a country from an oppressor who in many cases was put in charge by the west in the first place.

If only we got something out of the whole sorry business, I'm not sure I'd mind so much. Charging off on a proper imperialist war, in which we might at least break even, would make some sort of sense. The clowns whose heads we continually feel the need to bang together might even learn something about how to run a country. I like to think that just before Britain quit many of her colonies, there may have been discussions not unadjacent to a famous Monty Python sketch, and the beneficial proceeds of empire are clear for those with eyes to see. Now though the only things we build after decades of war are democratic systems for people who can't make them work, which in a country ruined by war, theocracy and desert is hardly surprising. At any rate, the denizens of the Cradle of Civilisation are well used to dictatorships by now, and have well-developed conflict-orientated ways of sorting out disputes. Why waste money on trying to make them do it our way, when it's more than likely they'll get it wrong and have to be violently shown the way again in two decades' time? It'll end in tears either way, so we might as well keep our chaps out of it if we're only losing money.

Imposing a political system cannot be done in a half-arsed manner. It has been shown over and over again that as soon as the tanks leave, it all goes downhill. The obvious solution is either not to put the tanks there in the first place and let people massacre each other, or not to remove them once the shooting has stopped. Put in political systems and make sure they stay there by running them ourselves. Teach the illiterate, free the women, feed the hungry and heal the sick, or do none of those things and stay at home. Let's stop being so squeamish about the issue - it's all or nothing, and it's got to be worth everybody's while.