Latin Lessons for Iraq

“The Follies of Democratic Imperialism” by Omar G. Encarnación, in World Policy Journal (Spring 2005), World Policy Institute, New School Univ., 66 Fifth Ave., 9th fl., New York, N.Y. 10011.

“There is no people not fitted for self government,” declared the idealistic American president, and so saying, he dispatched an expeditionary force abroad to topple a “government of butchers.” To the president’s vast surprise, the Americans weren’t universally hailed as liberators, and thousands rallied around the dictatorship to fight the invading Americans.

That president was not George W. Bush but Woodrow Wilson, who sent U.S. Marines to Mexico in 1914 to overthrow General Victoriano Huerta, who had seized power in a coup the year before. Anti-American riots, at first confined to Mexico City, spread to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay. A mediation conference ended in failure because Wilson wouldn’t budge from his demand that Huerta relinquish power and hold free elections. Huerta fled Mexico later that year, but democracy didn’t arrive in Mexico until 2000.

In the Caribbean and Central America, argues Encarnación, a political scientist at Bard College, “Wilson’s military occupations and attempts at creating democracy” during his two terms in office only “paved the way for a new generation of brutal tyrannies,” including those of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. The United States ruled the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, reorganizing much of the government and creating a national constabulary in order to help civilian leaders stay in power. A civil war that broke out after the Americans left ended only in 1930, when Rafael Trujillo,  commander of the very National Guard the Americans had created, seized power, inaugurating 31 years of harsh dictatorial rule.

Encarnación sees behind President Bush’s drive to democratize Iraq and the Middle East the same flawed premises that inspired Wilson’s failed crusade: that the spread of democracy, even by force, is an unqualified good; that people everywhere, regardless of their history or circumstances, are ready for democracy; and that America has a special mission to bring it to them and even impose it on them.

Like many other critics, Encarnación dismisses the relevance of apparent U.S. successes in democratizing Japan and Germany after World War II, since both countries had advantages, including past experience with democracy, not shared by Iraq and other target nations.

The Bush administration should learn from earlier U.S. successes in Latin America and elsewhere by “facilitating the conditions that enable nations to embrace democ­racy of their own free will: promoting human rights, alleviating poverty, and building effective governing institutions,” says Encarnación. As President Herbert Hoover once declared, “True democracy is not and cannot be imperialistic.”