LATIN AMERICAN LESSONS ABOUT REGIME CHANGE IN IRAQ

Cuban exile Carlos Alberto Montaner, one of Latin America´s foremost intellectuals and someone who, like myself, has little patience with US-bashers who blame their northern neighbor for that region´s backwardness, makes a thoughtful argument for accelerating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. He does so in a column that, unlike others in his website, is not yet available in English. The interesting thing about this piece is that the author uses Latin America to show that “regime change” is hardly ever successful. The reason is that if a republican juridical and constitutional structure is imposed from above by an outside power, basic values and habits need to sustain it-the type Iraq obviously lacks for the moment.

According to Montaner, Washington´s first attempt at regime change abroad took place in 1898 when, after the Spanish-American War, the U.S. occupied Cuba, rebuilt it, forced the locals to write a Constitution and hold elections, and left the island after handing power to President Estrada Palma. Four years later, Cuba was in total chaos and soon the U.S. marines were back. The same sequence—chaos, U.S. intervention to force the installation of a democratic republic, more chaos, new intervention-repeated itself a dozen times across the hemisphere. And, after all that sound and fury, Latin America´s failure to sustain reasonable republican structures continued. What American regime-changing idealists (to speak only of the well-intentioned interventionists) were missing was a basic point: the greatness of the United States had not come about by magic when the Constitution was approved in 1787 but through a tradition that antedated that Constitution, made of certain values and habits as regards the way people interacted and coexisted.

People who suffer under dictators tend to want freedom. Iraqis did so under Hussein, Cubans do so under Castro, Nicaraguans did so under Somoza. But you don´t go from there-not even with persuasive American guns pointing at your temples-to republican structures that limit power and protect the individual against third parties or against the state itself in a sudden leap. That much the U.S. failed to understand with regard to Latin America (and in sheer frustration Washington often ended up allying itself with very unsavoury characters). It is also what a part of the U.S. establishment, sometimes with the best intentions, fails to understand today with regard to Iraq.

Montaner ends his piece by suggesting U.S. troops should withdraw after the elections because “it is better to sit down and wait for a miracle to happen than to try to do it oneself”. This realization on the part of someone who deeply admires the United States and has promoted many of the values of civilization across this hemisphere for decades is particularly important.

One final note. Many Latin Americans have written authoritatively about the roots of their region´s political traditions and why they are distant from the values that led the Founding Fathers of the U.S. to frame a Constitution that was able to work reasonably well for a long time. No one did so better than the late Venezuelan author Carlos Rangel (who must be turning in his grave to see what is happening to his country today in books such as The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the U.S. and Third World Ideology and Western Reality .