GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Is democracy the ideal?

WASHINGTON -- President Bush says repeatedly that America is safest when democracy is on the march. President Clinton often repeated the idea that democracies don't go to war with each other.
The notion that America's vision -- and version -- of democracy was meant for all people as a fundamental expression of their common humanity was attested to by leaders from Jefferson to Lincoln to JFK.
And today, more than ever, these are not arcane arguments. For with the war in Iraq, America has put her entire future -- financial stability, respect in the world, the application of our ideas -- on the line for the "democratic" idea.
But what if it's wrong? What if transitions from autocracy actually create a more dangerous world? What if change has to be so carefully managed or "sequenced" that no one really has the secret of how to do it?
The good news here -- after nearly three years of the Iraq war, in which too many people uncritically accepted those original premises -- is that Washington think tanks and analysts are beginning to ask those crucial and multi-faceted questions.
At one meeting last week at the libertarian CATO Institute, for instance, Columbia University professor Jack Snyder and University of Pennsylvania professor Edward D. Mansfield cogently put forth their argument that "incomplete democracies can often actually be the dangerous process that leads to war -- and that, in fact, they create a four-fold to 15-fold chance of war." This is because "incomplete democracies," which Iraq is in the process of becoming, lack the institutions to carry them to becoming serious, developed democracies.
In Snyder and Mansfield's new book, "Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War," they address the idea that democracies don't go to war easily -- or at all. They cite many cases where governments that had had some form of elections led us into some of the worst modern wars: Yugoslavia, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Burundi, Indonesia, Ethiopia, India and Pakistan.
The ideal for change, they asserted at the crowded CATO meeting, would be "sequencing" -- essentially, first developing institutions, then the rule of law and, only at the end, electoral democracy. But they fully realize that this ideal is treacherous in practice.
At still another recent issue-related meeting on "Dissent and Reform in the Arab World," this one at the American Enterprise Institute, Arab dissidents carried the arguments further.
One of the Arab world's most respected democratic dissidents, Egypt's Dr. Saad Eddine Ibrahim, acknowledged the danger in opening up autocratically governed societies, but he insisted it is necessary.
'Optimistic note'
Moreover, he told the group, "Let me strike an optimistic note in reviewing the year 2005. The region has moved forward -- slowly, but definitely forward. The year 2005 was the 'year of the elections' -- two in Palestine, three in Iraq, two in Egypt. Does that amount to a 'spring of freedom' in the Arab world? Not quite! But there is something going on in the Middle East. Whether it is a spring or a mirage is yet to be determined, but we are determined to make it a spring.
"In this," he went on, "Egypt is pivotal. The barrier of fear has been broken -- people are no longer afraid of the regime."
Ibrahim's own hope for this dangerous transition, he concluded, would be that enough Islamist groups could be won over to the democratic center. Then, led by countries such as Morocco and Turkey, they could have moderate Islamic parties equivalent to the Christian Democrats in Europe. When he was imprisoned for opposing the Mubarak government, he met many formerly radical Islamists who had moderated -- "They do change," he said.
Finally, Kanan Makiya, the most respected early Iraqi dissident and writer, gave still another warning, this time about confusing dissent and reform.
"We have a blossoming of dissidence in Iraq today that we have not seen before," he told the group. "But the epitome of dissidence is that it is a cultural struggle to reflect on the self. Reform is an altogether different animal.
"It operates through huge bureaucracies that, even in the best cases, are slow to change. Reform is focused on politics; reform is very hard. The systems of the Arab world are far more resistant than we thought. We thought we'd be much further along by now."
You may wonder why I spend a lot of time at meetings like these. In fact, I've been charting them since well before the Iraq war started. They give you a special insight into the way thinking is evolving here within the administration and/or among the scholars and analysts who eventually might influence policy.
In the fall of 2002, in those ominous months before the war in Iraq, at virtually all of the think-tanks, sessions like these were radically and pompously pro-war.
Universal Press Syndicate