IRAQ, FATALISM, LIBERTY: QUESTIONS, NO ANSWERS: Today Fareed Zakaria has a typically sharp piece, basically just a list of potential (likely to somewhat likely) positive outcomes of war in Iraq. It’s a counterweight to cautionary pieces like this much-linked-by-me Gene Healy essay. Zakaria closes with, “There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I’ll take my chances with change.”

There’s a lot to be said for this attitude. I started to write a post about prospects for liberalization in Iraq, but–violating every tenet of the Blogger Code of Ethics–I decided not to because I don’t know enough about it. So instead, I’ll offer some Iraq-specific links, some general comments on liberalization, and some questions that attempt to connect the two.

One of the biggest enemies of liberalization in dictatorships is fatalism. A sense that the future has shut down, that anything that will happen will be bad (even if it’s better than worst). There are all kinds of fatalism–“there’s no point in doing anything, we can’t affect events” is different from “there’s no need to do anything, the rising tide of history will do all the work for us”–but none of the varieties are conducive to liberalization. They’re conducive, instead, to lassitude, resentment, and political irresponsibility. (Re the latter, I’m really not sure what the deal with the Iraqi National Congress is. This is a takedown; I’d be interested in other views, as well as more about the Group of Four participants mentioned in the second-to-last paragraph of that piece.)

Fatalism is based, though, on resignation to the status quo. When the status quo is seriously changed, there’s a chance that a critical mass of people will reject fatalism and throw their energies into strengthening the kind of social and political institutions that spur liberalization–opposition parties, rights groups, newspapers, small-business organizations and civic clubs, mutual aid networks, and so on. When you view your life as a pawn in a larger game, you may well react with an admixture of hope and terror when someone threatens to kick over the chessboard.

And when it comes to Iraq, I don’t have a big-picture, splashy, inspiring (because splashy) chessboard-kicking maneuver to suggest. I do think free trade is almost always preferable to sanctions, and perhaps lifting the sanctions on Iraq would disrupt the chess game enough to provide the necessary minimum of hope that spurs people to work to improve their lives. (Especially since, as Zakaria notes, “the oil-for-food program has become the oil-for-palaces program” and Saddam’s isolation has led to “starving millions of Iraqis.”) But mostly what I have instead of suggestions are suspicions–I suspect that you can almost never liberalize from above, rather than from below, for example. I suspect that it’s extraordinarily hard to impose sustainable civil society by force. (This is in large part because civil society just is the middle layer between people and government, thus it can’t really be produced by or enfolded in government. It’s the area of life governed by persuasion and the habits that persuasion fosters, the area of loyalty rather than fear, and responsibility rather than dependence. –If you’re hearing major similarities between my domestic and foreign policy views, that’s intentional. The constraining circumstances are much different, but the actors are only humans, and thus intelligible to us, I think.)

I wrote here about small ways people can carve out areas of their lives that they control, even under dictatorships, and how such experiences of control are the best preparation for liberty. I don’t, though, have a lot of ideas for how to foster those spaces of control in Iraq. I haven’t even seen much commentary that focused on this issue. (Feel free to send links and such, people.)

Those areas of personal control are a huge motivating force in rejecting tyranny. This is one of the motors driving “revolutions of rising expectations”–the deal is, many revolutions occur not at the times of greatest oppression, but precisely when the regime has loosened its hold a bit on the reins. Rising expectations both disrupt fatalism and make it easier for people to experience a degree of responsibility and freedom. These revolutions are by no means always a good thing–the Bolshevik Revolution is often cited as a revolution of rising expectations. But in this case, it’s hard to make any kind of case against revolution (depending, of course, on who is doing the revolting)….

It seems like the U.S.’s talk of war may have started to shake the chessboard a little. Go here and here for more. (Links via InstaPundit.)

So I want to know what makes Iraqis’ expectations rise, and what does not. Are some aspects of our pre- and pro-war rhetoric and strategy working against others? It certainly seems like it from here. (For example, it’s hard, I think, to welcome an invasion by a country that says it will do this. Not to mention this.) Are there actions we can take short of war that will foster rising expectations, and how can we respect and meet those expectations rather than betraying them? (We do not have the world’s greatest track record on the latter, to put it mildly.) I haven’t seen any proposals that look realistic here–I don’t count an international criminal trial as especially realistic or even helpful.

So, as Jello Biafra says, “I’m not telling you–I’m asking you.”