Benjamin Hoffman is one of several people I've seen around lately reviving the notion that the real sense in which the second Gulf War is part of the war on terrorism is that it was a necessary first step to reconstructing the failed Middle Eastern political system that was a breeding ground for terrorism. One hasn't heard much about this lately, because right now Iraq seems exceedingly unlikely to develop a liberal political order, which makes the whole argument a bit moot....
The disagreement is about why and where Iraq fits into this whole picture. I think folks who supported the war on these grounds (Tom Friedman, etc.) are suffering from a serious case of false consciousness. In other words, it's not the case that they have a big idea -- The Need for Reconstruction -- and then the small idea -- Invade Iraq -- follows logically from TNFR. Rather, they had a big idea -- TNFR -- and no real idea of what followed from it. At the same time, there were all these people out there saying "invade Iraq!" "invade Iraq!" "invade Iraq!" so they manaed to convince themselves that invading Iraq would be a good way to implement their big idea. But it isn't, and it wasn't.
Iraq has to be considered one of the worst possible candidates for a democratic transitions. It combined a total absence of civil society with a huge case of resource curse, poor relations with its neighbors, and two awkwardly large minority populations. As an Arab model it suffers from the further flaw that an Iraqi democracy would be a Shi'ite democracy, which is not the best example for all the Sunni Arab countries out there. The right way to try and effect transformation would have been to support the states -- Morocco, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain -- that are already transforming, and to try and use leverage to push Egypt to change. Egypt has a dominant Sunni Arab population, is the center of Arab media and culture, has civil society groups, has some pseudo-democratic institutions in place, is subject to American pressure, and has no resource curse. This was not, I readily admit, obvious to me in December 2001 or whenever, but I don't think anyone who seriously and objectively thought about the question could possibly come to the conclusion that invading Iraq was a high-percentage transformative move.
