Reflections on Democracy and the Gulf War

Abstract

iThe readiness of those states with longest and deepest traditions of democracy to rush headlong into cruel, merciless, and vengeful war in Gulf simply startles political imagination. States that celebrate elections, human rights, and constitutionalism have shown themselves all too ready to deploy massive force to maintain resource hegemony and geopolitical ambition. For all that claims about democracy have been invoked as a rhetoric of legitimation, this has been a war about oil and capacity of United States to establish itself as primary leader of post-Cold War global security arrangements, or, as George Bush expresses it, the new world order. The specific relevance of democracy in such conflicts is impossible to establish, for political behavior is always overdetermined. There were differences, for example, between US intervention in Indochina and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and some of these might be linked to presence or absence of a democratic political culture. The role of public opinion and domestic opposition was certainly more significant in United States, whereas a reversal of official policy was easier to achieve in Soviet Union. Yet from perspective of target societies, similarities undoubtedly outweighed differences. In both cases, political life of a Third World country was manipulated in order to validate a military intervention directed against civilian society, an intervention that produced massive suffering. In both, battlefield was confined to Third World arena, and unequal character of war was its most basic quality, with a superpower pitted against a poor, underdeveloped, yet stubbornly nationalist, adversary. Both wars can be properly classified as imperial and as expressions of East-West geopolitical rivalry. Although military superiority and decisive technological advantage was on intervening side in both instances, US style of