Andrew Sullivan attempts to ding Daniel Larison for an overly dogmatic realist critique of democratization.

Larison first:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Sullivan writes, “I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East,” and goes on to cite Iran as proof of the instability of the autocratic model when it comes to succession.

He’s missing the point, though. I’m not sure even steely Larison would go so far as to argue that autocratic succession is any kind of ideal. Autocracies by their very nature change leaders amidst a tension that can at any time spill over into war. Indeed, the greatest achievement of democracy has been that power transfers have been institutionalized to the point of violence being a nearly unthinkable outcome.

What Daniel is correctly railing against, however, is the by far most questionable aspect of Democratic Peace theory: namely that democracies do not go to war against each other. Democratic Peace theorists like the claim, with some sleights of hand, that history bears out this claim. But Daniel’s counter-example is a powerful one. Is there much doubt that the Arab Street, if given access to the reins of power, would demand anything but the annihilation of Israel?

Daniel Larison has a characteristically insightful and thoughtful post up about the rush to double standards that the strong showing of Yisrael Beiteinu is provoking in people. Contra Greenwald, he argues that the real inconsistency is not that America won’t threaten to recall its ambassador to Israel if Avigdor Lieberman gets a cabinet post as it did to Vienna when Joerg Haider won 26% of the vote in Austria. Rather, it’s that people who are strong believers in the goodness of democracy seek to delegitimize and circumvent legitimate expressions of popular support for politics they find abhorrent.

Absolutely correct, though I suspect my conclusion is somewhat different from Daniel’s. I’m simply much more skeptical about the wisdom of “the people” in any given situation. To vulgarize Churchill: we’re for democracy not because it’s awesome, but because everything else sucks more.

A marine writes to Andrew Sullivan (in part):

…I recalled our training on Iraqi culture prior to our deployment.  A professor from Georgetown University had warned us (mostly college educated officers) how different it would be to interact with illiterate people.  Most people in Al Anbar could not read, she said, and therefore they had only their limited personal experience, and the words of their elders, to provide context to their reality.  For a literate person, it is virtually impossible to comprehend how an illiterate person processes information.  How true this observation turned out to be. The idea that our civilian leadership thought liberal democracy would spring up naturally in this environment still seems incomprehensibly foolish to me.

I highlight this passage in the context of the Kennelly/Larison/Peters debate. Peters’ article is so offensive because it pegs the difference between us and “them” as one of “values”. That this is a gross oversimplification of things is wonderfully highlighted in the above-quoted passage. Compare it with Peters’ insights:

So: These humanoid forms with which we must deal don’t all want or value the same things we do. They form different social aggregates and exchange goods and services within wildly different parameters (and exhibit hypocritical sexual tastes that diverge from procreative mandates - ask our troops about that).

How “these humanoid forms” view sex and trade is very much besides the point when it comes to our failures to “fix” their societies. And this is giving Peters all too much credit in assuming that he can accurately divine any sort of values system from interacting with our alien enemy in the first place.

[EDIT: I’ve changed the post subject to be less vituperative. There’s no need to go there, regardless of my feelings on the quality of Peters’ argument.]