Disclaimer: I'm a pacifist, and if I were in Congress I would automatically vote against any war resolution unless I might be the marginal vote on it, in which case I would think about it but need serious convincing to vote for it. That said...
It strikes me that there are a few conditions which make a foreign-interventionist "regime change" possible in a "successful" manner. The first, obviously, is that the nation in question must be a non-democracy, an oppressive, authoritarian regime, or why do you want to regime change in the first place? (All anti-democratic regime changes treated as illegitimate for this discussion.) The second is, of course, that it will be relatively simple, ideally with minimal collateral damage and casualties, to militarily defeat the incumbent oppressive regime. But the thing that made Iraq and Afghanistan work so terribly badly is that the third condition was lacking, namely a genuine and healthy appetite for democratic self-governance on a basis acceptable to, say, the values of the populace of the invading power. If you have a country, that is, where the people would really like to be democratically governing themselves, but they have this oppressive authoritarian regime that won't let them and is just too damn strong militarily for them to beat it, a foreign military power might genuinely be able to, in effect, join their revolution, either overtly or just by being one hell of an arsenal of democracy. I'm notably not a foreign policy expert, having taken (so far) big fat 0 international relations courses, and being generally less wonky and well-informed about international affairs than domestic policy matters, but it strikes me that such a country might well be ripe for some kind of regime change, again if I weren't a pacifist.
Is Iran such a country? Conditions #1 and #2 apply, definitely, and there is some evidence that Condition #3 might apply as well. Now, of course, I am not, repeat not advocating war with Iran; if I'm advocating anything, it might be an arsenal-of-democracy strategy if a popular revolution starts of its own accord. There are massively bad things about attacking Iran, the oil shock, the general geopolitical destabilization, the "you and what army?" thing, and of course the killing (which is kind of a deal-breaker for me), and of course I don't know that Part III applies there in a way it didn't in the neighboring countries. But I just think that, setting aside the fundamental moral objection to war, from what I know of Iran it seems like it could be a relatively regime-changeable country.
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In this hypothetical, you have only made provisions for establishing democracies to replace oppressive autocracies, which seems to indicate that you view democracy as inherently better than other forms of government. Would your views regarding regime changes in autocratic countries only also apply even if there was a country with a democratic government that was rather oppressive or unstable? This is just a hypothetically, and all the examples I can think of are from antiquity, but the question, I feel, is still valid. Demagoguery can be quite as dangerous as military dictatorships.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, as I said, I don't *support* regime change, and some things said at an event about the Middle East, including Iran, that I went to yesterday made me think that this analysis was a bit overly simplistic (you think?). And as long as a democracy is genuinely democratic, I don't think that anyone has a right to violently overthrow it (except in a war where that democratic nation was clearly the aggressor, maybe); the right of revolution, internal or external, by violent force only possibly attaches when the power of revolution through democratic processes is genuinely removed.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it depends one how one defines "genuinely democratic," but still, fair enough.
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