{"id":876,"date":"2005-10-17T05:35:55","date_gmt":"2005-10-17T05:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:25","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:25","slug":"the_vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=876","title":{"rendered":"The Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Constitutions matter, because they confer<\/b> legitimacy.<\/p>\n

Dan Darling talks below<\/a> about the Iraqi constitutional referendum, and points out that while a success for the Iraqi political process, it certainly doesn’t mean that the terror will stop.<\/p>\n

The war certainly isn’t over.<\/p>\n

But we’re moving toward one of the key preconditions for it being over, both in Iraq and more widely.<\/p>\n

And that is an increasing rejection<\/b> of the legitimacy of terrorism, and even Islamist politics … within Iraq and the broader Arab world.<\/p>\n

This is critical, because as commenter DJPR points<\/a> out (in suggesting that the election wasn’t all that, with or without the bag of chips):<\/p>\n

Max Weber stated that the monopoly on violence within a given delinated territory is the fundamental definition of a government.<\/p>\n

\nIn the mid-to-long term, can the Iraqi Government achive this in any sort of meaningful way?<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DJ makes a common mistake (not unlike going against a Sicilian when death is on the line); he misquotes Weber.<\/p>\n

What Weber actually said (as I discussed<\/a> a while ago) was that:<\/p>\n

Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The question isn’t whether there is terrorist violence within Iraq, but whether that violence is perceived by a substantial part of the population as legitimate.<\/p>\n

The recent Pew study (cited in the L.A. Times<\/a>) suggests that terrorism is perceived by the Muslim world as less legitimate than it has been in the past:<\/p>\n

The percentage of people holding a favorable impression of the United States increased in Indonesia (+23 points), Lebanon (+15), Pakistan (+2) and Jordan (+16). It also went up in such non-Muslim nations as France, Germany, Russia and India.<\/p>\n

\nWhat accounts for this shift? The answer varies by country, but analysts point to waning public anger over the invasion of Iraq, gratitude for the massive U.S. tsunami relief effort and growing conviction that the U.S. is serious about promoting democracy.<\/p>\n

\nThere is also increasing aversion to America’s enemies, even in the Islamic world. The Pew poll found that “nearly three-quarters of Moroccans and roughly half of those in Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia see Islamic extremism as a threat to their countries.”<\/p>\n

\nSupport for suicide bombing has declined dramatically in all the Muslim countries surveyed except Jordan, with its large anti-Israeli Palestinian population. The number of those saying that “violence against civilian targets is sometimes or often justified” has dropped by big margins in Lebanon (-34 points) and Indonesia (-12) since 2002, and in the last year in Pakistan (-16) and Morocco (-27).<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The success of the elections in Iraq is independent of the outcome; what matters is that all parties – Sunni and Sh’ia alike are engaged in a political struggle over the direction of the state.<\/p>\n

They are granting some measure of legitimacy to the state; that is exactly the outcome that the Islamists sought to block.<\/p>\n

We’re not done yet. But the things that we need to see happen do, in fact seem to be happening.<\/p>\n

In January of 2003, I said:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to \u2018declare victory and go home\u2019 when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And while we’re damn good with stuff and money, this is going to take much more, and we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves, work, and be willing to sweat with this for some time.<\/p>\n

\nThere are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it\u2019s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. I don’t think that Germany is a good example, because once we de-Nazified, there was some tradition of liberal politics to work with. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward doesn’t have any of that.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s true today as much as it was then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Constitutions matter, because they confer legitimacy. Dan Darling talks below about the Iraqi constitutional referendum, and points out that while a success for the Iraqi political process, it certainly doesn’t mean that the terror will stop. The war certainly isn’t over. But we’re moving toward one of the key preconditions for it being over, both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}