Failure of the New Pax Americana

This is not the first country I am living in that is at war with Iraq. I was born in Tehran in 1982 and lived there for 16 years, a period that included the entire Persian-Iraq war, which lasted for eight years thanks to many people, including President Reagan and his sales of weapons to both sides of that war. But my experience felt very different back then. Some of the most vivid memories from the first seven years of my life revolve around trying to literally survive the Iraqi air strikes.

One of the images I remember is the windows in our living room, which my parents had duct-taped to prevent glass from scattering everywhere in case of an air strike. Another image that remains terrifyingly vivid in memories after so many years is the times when as we watched TV, the screen would suddenly go red and sirens go off as we ran to a room in our basement that was our war-time sanctuary. One time after running to the basement, a hospital five blocks from my house was struck, which created an explosion so intense that it shook the ceiling lamp in the room.

As the oldest democracy in the world, the United States has an incredible opportunity to lead the world with democratic leadership and be a model for the people in countries under oppressive regimes to rise above the few who assert illegitimate power over them. The reason for the United States' continuous foreign policy failures is the inability of neo-conservatives to allow the people in other countries to establish a lasting democracy the same way America did: from the ground up, through the necessary social phases and without foreign intervention.

The American Revolution brought the strongest democracy to the world because the people in this country went through the necessary stages to understand why democracy, while imperfect, was a better system than all others that had previously been tried. Democracy is not an isolated incident that, if artificially created, would last and flourish. It is rather the last point in the sequence of an evolutionary social process. As long as war hawks in the West believe there is a military shortcut to bringing democracy to other countries that do not have a complete understanding of it, their plans will continue to backfire.

An example of neo-cons' failed strategy is their approach in Iraq. George Bush, Dick Cheney and William Kristol promised that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. But even though they occupied that country, overthrew Saddam Hussein, killed him and his sons, and gave its people four years and three elections, Iraqis have unsurprisingly proved incapable of making the necessary compromises to maintain a democracy. In such circumstances, President Bush who continues to lack an understanding of the region's geopolitics insists that a few thousands more troops will help democracy flourish in Iraq. Relying on this delusional fantasy, the president and his congressional allies stubbornly blocked the bill that funded our soldiers and simultaneously set a timetable to track our progress despite the demand of the majority of Iraqi factions for U.S. to begin withdrawing troops.

Neo-conservatives' convictions in the ideas that have stemmed from the "Project for the New American Century" and the concept of a New Pax Americana have become our worst enemy in our efforts to spread democracy and a tool for terrorists to recruit more terrorists. It was also based on such misguided principles that President Reagan's administration armed and trained the paramilitary forces in Nicaragua and sponsored terrorism in Nicaragua in the 1980's that resulted in the weakening of the democratically-elected and pragmatic Sandinistas. President Eisenhower pursued a similar failing philosophy when in 1953, he allowed the CIA to collaborate with the British intelligence to organize a coup d'etat in Tehran to overthrow one of the most popular and democratically-elected figures in Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq. There is now little debate among historians that the main reason behind the anti-American revolution in Iran in 1979 was the CIA's intervention to replace Mossadeq with the dictatorial Shah. Kristol now urges immediate military action and predicts that the U.S. will be greeted as liberators in Tehran. He is wrong.

The people in the world -- regardless of their origins, skin color and religion -- all want to live in a free, safe and prosperous world to raise their children and have a good life. But as long as our leaders spoil the little steps people in oppressive states make to establish lasting democracies for the sake of short-term American economic and political interests, freedom will remain far from the hands of those who need it the most.