Democracy After War Unrealistic

Author: Ryan Hisner

Pro-war advocates often assume that after the United States has successfully overthrown Saddam Hussein, it will install a benign leader and bring democracy to Iraq. This will, they argue, improve the life of the Iraqi people. But how do we know if this will happen? We could take the government's word for it. Or we could look at the governments the United States has overthrown and then given power to in the past.
Let's start with Brazil. In 1961 Joao Goulart was elected president. His leftist policies and involvement with Brazilian labor and peasant organizations greatly disturbed the United States. Robert Kennedy confronted this growing threat to U.S. business interests by telling Goulart to adopt pro-American policies or face reductions in U.S. aid. In 1963 a military coup occurred with the full support of the United States. Lincoln Gordon, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil at the time, said the revolution should "create a greatly improved climate for private investments."
The new government destroyed the labor movement and instituted policies favoring the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This eventually led to appalling conditions as seen in recent years, where, according to Amnesty International, children have been forced to the streets to support their families and are then tortured, beaten and killed by police. There are other problems as well.
According to the Brazilian Health Ministry, hundreds of thousands of children die of hunger each year. The primary school dropout rate is 80 percent and slave laborers are forced to work 16 hours a day and are beaten or tortured. Half the farmland is owned by one percent of the farmers, seven million abandoned children must beg and steal to survive and fewer children are vaccinated than in Tanzania and Botswana. All this after, according to Gordon, "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century." All this has transpired in one of the most resource-rich countries in the world. A victory indeed.
Guatemala, where U.S.-backed coups laid the path for Guatemalan "development," is another example. Today 87 percent of the population lives in poverty and 72 percent don't get enough to eat. Forty percent of the population lacks drinking water and two percent owns 70 percent of the land. Since the United States took over, an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans have been killed.
Panama is another sparkling success story. After the 1989 U.S. invasion, in which there were widespread reports of massacres by U.S. troops, poverty rose 14 percent. A post-invasion U.N. report revealed horrific effects on health, food, education, housing and culture. Human rights violations have increased, and according to a USAID study, use of narcotics has quadrupled. Panama's Congress reports that drug trafficking has doubled and money laundering has "flourished," as was widely predicted.
The Dominican Republic offers another interesting case. In 1963, a year after the first-ever free elections in the Dominican Republic, a military coup took place, fully supported by the United States. Two years later the people tried to overthrow the military regime and reinstate the elected president, but the United States intervened and then watched as civilians were slaughtered. In the 1970s under the U.S. imposed government, political murders were rife, wages declined and the country was opened up to foreign (U.S.) exploitation. By 1985, 90 percent of the population was malnourished. Such is the legacy of a U.S. installed government.
Similar things happened in Iran, where a CIA-sponsored coup put the Shah in power, leading to what Amnesty International called "a history of torture which is beyond belief," and in Indonesia, where the U.S.-backed General Suharto butchered 700,000 on his way to power. The list is far from complete.
Why would Iraq be any different than any of these countries, especially when the president and half his administration are oil magnates? Make no mistake, the U.S. government does not care about the Iraqi people or the atrocities they suffer. Otherwise it wouldn't have contributed to such atrocities in the past.

Ryan Hisner is from Decatur, Indiana.