OP-ED: "Hearts, Minds ... and Schools: War isn't the best route to democracy," by Lawrence E. Harrison, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 25 December 2006-7 January 2007, p. 23.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to war: A landmark in the peace process," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ARTICLE: "The alternative to voting: A slide back into all-out war," The Economist, 16 December 2006, p. 40.

ON LANGUAGE: "Realism: The comeback work in foreign policy," by William Safire, New York Times Magazine, 24 December 2006, p. 20.

Good and very thoughtful op-ed by Harrison, that's somewhat obscured by the silly title (Duh! War isn't the best route? WHODATHUNKIT!). In it, Harrison makes a good case--based on a big project of research--that changing culture is the key to creating economic opportunity and successful connectivity with the outside world, and that this is the best route to generating democracy in the long run:

Our goal was to capture the role of culture and cultural change in a society's evolution. We found that Confucian values of education, achievement and merit played a central role in the economic "miracles" in East Asia. Open economic policies and the welcoming of foreign investment triggered several transformations, including in India, Ireland and Spain. Visionary leadership was crucial in the cases of Botswana, Turkey and Quebec. In Ireland, Italy, Spain and Quebec, modernization was also accompanied by decline in the influence of the Catholic Church [mostly on birth control, a concept that make sense as your economy matures--thus putting you at odds with the church--Tom].

We concluded that enlightened policies can, over time, produce cultural change--change that in turn spurs political pluralism and economic development. However, it is extremely difficult to impose such changes from outside; war is not a helpful instrument. Better tools include education that inculcates democratic and entrepreneurial values; improved child-rearing practices; religious reform; and development assistance keyed to cultural change.

Then he goes on to list a number of foci that make sense in assistance, like literacy and getting (and keeping) girls in school.

No arguments from me on that stuff (as these are arguments I've offered myself in PNM and BFA). My only problem with this article is the presumed binary choice between using war as an instrument and avoiding it.

Obviously, you don't want to have to wage war any more than is absolutely necessary, but the definition of necessary is crucial. Some situations (e.g., certain dictatorships, some forms of civil strife) simply won't get better without outside intervention. These are ongoing wars against individuals within countries that will rage on--if allowed--and thus prevent the evolutions in culture that Harrison rightfully advocates. In fact, left to their own course, these situations not only retard such necessary evolution, they can send the societies in question down retrograde paths of dissolution (in many ways, on display in Iraq today and what we saw in ethnic cleansing throughout long-repressed Yugoslavia). Great dysfunction like that often necessitates very violent divorces, which we can trigger (like in Iraq) or stand by and idly observe (Balkans), but which we'll likely be drawn into in some manner because of the inevitably resulting regional instability.

You can say, "We should only take on the easy jobs," but truth be told, the easy jobs will be handled for the most part by the private sector (not a big U.S. military interventionary role in Ireland and India, for example). It's the stinkers that get left to intervening states.

And no, I've never advocated (as some cartoonish reviews of my work surmise) invading every Gap state to bring integration. But in certain cases, intervening is the best route, not for creating democracy, but for removing a key impediment to its eventual emergence. Why? Dictators tend to squelch economic connectivity between the masses and the outside world, because to let that stuff unfold is to lose power progressively over time. And civil strife kills such connectivity simply by making the environment too scary for outsiders to enter (unless they're energy companies protected by private security firms).

So yeah, war isn't the best route to democracy. But in certain cases wars are the only way to get to a postwar in which Harrison's ideas can get their logical play.

But if we're real realists, we're not interested in that postwar, just picking and choosing our wars for specific punitive effect. The problem is, the games really are won in the postwar nowadays, not in the wars. So interventionary wars themselves are not the problem (and indeed, sometimes are the solution), it's our unwillingness to take seriously the challenges of the postwar.

Indonesia's Aceh is mired in intractable conflict for decades, until the perfect, crushingly destructive foreign intervention occurs, known as the tsunami.

The disaster opened the eyes of both the government in Jakarta and the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) to Aceh's war-weariness. A peace deal was struck in August 2005. Since then, events have unfolded more hopefully than anyone could have predicted. Under the supervision of monitors led by the European Union, GAM disarmed and Indonesian troops returned to barracks. A law was passed granting Aceh generous autonomy.

A quasi-separation, achieved peacefully, amidst the massive reconstruction effort following untold destruction and death from a nasty outside force that crushed all in its path.

That's not to wish tsunamis on intractable conflicts. It's simply to note that sometimes something has to intervene from outside to break the deadlock, kill the conflict, stop the shooting and repression.

We made our recovery effort, engaging in nation-building and reconstruction with a far lighter hand and including a nifty array of local partners, and we resurrected a military-to-military relationship with Indonesia's armed forces for our reward.

Compare that effort (which I highlighted in BFA) with Sri Lanka's slide back into war. Yeah, it'd be nice if India took that one on again, but that's unlikely. And given the violence that will once again pervade that society, there's almost no chance that any of Harrison's precepts will be given a chance.

I know, I know. We're all realists now, thanks to our failings in postwar (not in the war) Iraq. But even an able diagnostician of those failures such as George Packer will readily admit that:

At some point events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security--that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils.

Globalization ain't going away, despite all its complications and challenges, and so pretending we'll only take the easy cases when we own the world's largest military just ain't realistic. Because what we don't try to fix (hopefully with plenty of others), others will be forced to fix--however well they can.

The real unrealism of today is the belief that by eschewing difficult efforts, we meet the Hippocratic criteria of "do no harm," when the harm, in virtually every instance you can name, has already been done by ourselves and others, leaving us just to contemplate whether we give a damn at this point or simply want to pass off our problems to those "others," whose efforts will inevitably be cast by national security types as "clear proof" that Country A is trying to reduce our influence by increasing theirs, and thus harming our "national interests," which too often consist of nothing more than our belief that certain regions are ours and ours alone to either ignore or screw around with.