Via Dan: The not-terribly-surprising but still most unpleasant news that Hoover’s Larry Diamond– the democratization scholar and optimist, editor of the Journal of Democracy, and sometime advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority– has decided not to go back to Iraq.
“We just bungled this so badly,” said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We just weren’t honest with ourselves or with the American people about what was going to be needed to secure the country.”
Diamond was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and spent several initially hopeful months in Iraq — lecturing on democracy, even in mosques, encouraging people to participate and helping shape laws that embodied his vision. He returned to Palo Alto in early April for a short break, then ran into an emotional brick wall, he said, when he contemplated the mess he had left behind.
Last Thursday, when it came time for Diamond to return, he did not get on the plane.
Instead, he was in his office at the Hoover Tower, disillusioned over the desperate turn of events he had witnessed and what he feels was a country allowed to spin out of control, in large part, he says, because of the Bush administration’s unwillingness to commit a big enough force to protect Iraqis from militias and insurgents.
“You can’t develop democracy without security,” he said. “In Iraq, it’s really a security nightmare that did not have to be. If you don’t get that right, nothing else is possible. Everything else is connected to that.”
Diamond’s someone who knows what he’s talking about in this arena, one of the political scientists most widely and deeply versed in the experiences of and literature about democratization. And he’s not prone to doomsaying.
For those of us who are outisiders struggling to weigh evidence about how badly things are going in Iraq, I tink this is a very important piece of very disspiriting news.
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