A few points that I feel must be made here. First,...

2005-12-01T16:53:00.000Z

A few points that I feel must be made here. First, Democratic Peace "Theory" is merely an observation of the lack of conflicts between democracies from 1900 on, before that it does not hold. So there is not much there, really. It is relatively easy to point to historical circumstances that dictated peace between the democracies...the presence of a common enemy in the form of Germany or Communism for much of the last century. What Mr. Owen seems to completely miss is that democratic peace theory, even if we accept it's premise based on this very flimsy evidence, only holds that democracies are unlikely to attack other democracies. It says nothing about their beligerance towards non-democratic states. America, for example, sent troops into scores of other countries from 1900 to 2005.

How democratic Iraq becomes is irrelevant, given that there are no democratic neighbors available for it to be less likely to attack.

I do applaud Mansfield and Snyder for seeing that internal politics can be the motive for external aggression. Such a simple thing that most in International Relations miss.

However, I think that they miss the target here...internal politics is just as viable for causing aggression in democracies as in transitionals, just not against other democracies, maybe.

It has been comical watching the press and political scientists avoid seeing the truth of the invasion of Iraq; that the motive was the internal political needs of the Republican Party.

Immediately after the first part of the Gulf War the Bush administration was quite rational and explicit in describing all the reasons to leave Saddam in power, pointing out all of the pitfalls we have now encountered.

But other forces were at work. The Republicans had just lost a central unifying paradigm, "Tougher on Communism." They needed a new glue to hold the disparate factions of the party together. So really just as soon as Clinton was elected they started to work to claim "Tougher on Saddam/Terrorism." This paradigm gained momentum and eventually they were faced with a reality that forced invasion. Clinton had bombed Iraq every three days, on average, in addition to maintaining the sanctions regime. There is nowhere to go that is tougher short of invasion. In order to maintain their new unifying paradigm, they had to invade Iraq. Never mind that the rational and realistic scenario we would likely encounter had been described by them only a decade earlier. Loyalty to the paradigm now meant they did not even plan for the eventualities they had previously described as likely.

The reason that we have had to endure such a laundry list of excuses for invading Iraq is because all of them are false. The primary motive was maintaining the unity of the Republican Party. At any cost.

Carmi Turchick tribalypredisposed@yahoo.com

Comments on The Reflection Cafe: Iraq and the Democratic Peace

A few points that I feel must be made here. First,...