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 Review Essay

Iraq and the Democratic Peace

Who Says Democracies Don't Fight?

7ohn M. Omen IV

Electing to Fight.-Why Emerging foreign policy, especially the Iraq war--a

Democracies Go to War. BY EDWARD D.
MANSFIELD AND JACK SNYDER.
MIT Press, 2005, 288 pp. $32.95.
Seldom if ever has the hostility between
academics and the U.S. president been
so pronounced. Of course, political sci-
entists always seem to complain about
the occupant of the White House, and
Republicans fare worse than Democrats:
Herbert Hoover was called callous, Dwight
Eisenhower a dunce, Richard Nixon evil,
Ronald Reagan dangerous, and George
H.W. Bush out of touch. But professors
have consigned George W. Bush to a
special circle of their presidential hell.
And the White House seems to return
the sentiment.
According to the academics, Bush's
chief transgressions have had to do with
mess that could have been avoided if only
the president and his advisers had paid
more attention to those who devote their
lives to studying international relations.
The irony of this argument is that few
other presidents-certainly none since
Woodrow Wilson, a former president of
the American Political Science Association,
scribbled away in the Oval Office-have
tied their foreign policies more explicitly
to the work of social science. The defining
act of Bush's presidency was grounded in
a theory that the political scientist Jack
Levy once declared was "as close as any-
thing we have to an empirical law in
international relations," namely, that
democracies do not fight one another.
The theory, which originated in the
work of the eighteenth-century philoso-
pher Immanuel Kant and was refined in

JOHN M. OWEN IV is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of

Virginia and the author of LiberalPeace, Liberal War. American Politics and
InternationalSecurity.

[122]
 Iraqandthe DemocraticPeace
the 1970s and 198os by several researchers
working independently, has, since the
199os, been one of the hottest research
areas in international relations. Although
some skeptics remain and no one agrees
about why exactly it works, most academics
now share the belief that democracies
have indeed made a separate peace. What
is more, much research suggests that
they are also unusually likely to sign and
honor international agreements and to
become economically interdependent.
The administrations of Presidents
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton made
frequent appeals to the theory in public,
and it seems to have informed their
support for democratization in former
communist lands and in Haiti. The cur-
rent Bush administration, however, has
gone much further in its faith in the idea,
betting the farm that the theory holds and
will help Washington achieve a peaceful,
stable, and prosperous Muslim world as,
over time, Iraq's neighbors, following
Iraq's example, democratize. The United
States' real motives for attacking Iraq may
have been complex, but "regime change"-
the replacement of Saddam Hussein's
gruesome tyranny with a democracy-
was central to Washington's rhetoric by
the time it began bombing Baghdad in
March 2003.
Why has a president who set his
defining policy around one of political
science's crown jewels come in for so much
venom from the same academics who
endorse the idea? After all, a host of peer-
reviewed journal articles have implicitly
supported the president's claim that a
democratic Iraq would not threaten the
United States or Israel, develop weapons
of mass destruction, or sponsor terrorism.
Are professors simply perpetual critics
FOREIGN AFFAIRS •November/December 200 S
who refuse to take responsibility for the
consequences of their ideas? Or does
Bush hatred trump social science?
The Bush administration's desire to
break with its predecessors and alter the
authoritarian status quo in the Middle
East was admirable. But the White House
got its science wrong, or at least not com-
pletely right: the democratic peace theory
does not dictate that the United States can
or should remake Iraq into a democracy.
In Electing to Fight: Why Emerging
Democracies Go to War, the veteran political
scientists Edward Mansfield and Jack
Snyder make two critical points. Not only
is turning authoritarian countries into
democracies extremely difficult, much
more so than the administration seems to
have anticipated. The Middle East could
also become a much more dangerous place
if Washington and the rest of the world
settle for a merely semidemocratic regime
in Baghdad. Such an Iraq, Mansfield and
Snyder imply, would be uncommonly
likely to start wars-a bull in the Middle
Eastern china shop. Unfortunately, such
an Iraq may also be just what we are likely
to end up with.
ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACIES
At first glance, the realists' critique of the
Iraq war is easier to understand than that
of the democratic peace theorists. Indeed,
realism-which holds that a country's
type of government has no systematic
effects on its foreign policy-is enjoying
a revival in Washington these days, pre-
cisely because of the war. According to the
realists, the best way to have dealt with
Saddam would have been not to overthrow
him but to use coercive bargaining: to have
threatened him with annihilation, for ex-
ample, if he ever used nuclear weapons.
[123]
 John M Owen IV
Even the democratic peace theory,
however, does not necessarily prescribe
the use of force to transform despotisms
such as Iraq into democracies. Indeed, by
itself, the argument that democracies do
not fight one another does not have any
practical implications for the foreign pol-
icymaker. It needs an additional or minor
premise, such as "the United States can
make Iraq into a democracy at an accept-
able cost." And it is precisely this minor
premise about which the academy has been
skeptical. No scholarly consensus exists
on how countries become democratic, and
the literature is equally murky on the costs
to the United States of trying to force
them to be free.
This last part of the puzzle is even more
complicated than it first appears. Enter
Mansfield and Snyder, who have been
contributing to the democratic peace
debate for a decade. Their thesis, first
published in 1995, is that although mature
democracies do not fight one another, de-
mocratizing states-those in transition
from authoritarianism to democracy-
do, and are even more prone to war than
authoritarian regimes. Now, in Electing
to Fight,the authors have refined their
argument. As they outline in the book,
not only are "incomplete democratizing"
states-those that develop democratic
institutions in the wrong order-unlikely
ever to complete the transition to democ-
racy; they are also especially bellicose,
According to Mansfield and Snyder,
in countries that have recently started to
hold free elections but that lack the proper
mechanisms for accountability (institutions
such as an independent judiciary, civilian
control of the military, and protections for
opposition parties and the press), politicians
have incentives to pursue policies that
[124] FOREIGN AFFAIRS" Volume84No.6
make it more likely that their countries will
start wars. In such places, politicians know
they can mobilize support by demanding
territory or other spoils from foreign
countries and by nurturing grievances
against outsiders. As a result, they push
for extraordinarily belligerent policies.
Even states that develop democratic in-
stitutions in the right order--adopting
the rule of law before holding elections-
are very aggressive in the early years of
their transitions, although they are less
so than the first group and more likely to
eventually turn into full democracies.
Of course, politicians in mature
democracies are also often tempted to
use nationalism and xenophobic rhetoric
to buttress their domestic power. In such
cases, however, they are usually restrained
by institutionalized mechanisms of account-
ability. Knowing that if they lead the
country into a military defeat or quagmire
they may be punished at the next election,
politicians in such states are less likely to
advocate a risky war. In democratizing
states, by contrast, politicians know that
they are insulated from the impact of bad
policies: if a war goes badly, for example,
they can declare a state of emergency,
suspend elections, censor the press, and
so on. Politicians in such states also tend
to fear their militaries, which often crave
foreign enemies and will overthrow civil-
ian governments that do not share their
goals. Combined, these factors can
make the temptation to attack another
state irresistible.
Mansfield and Snyder present both
quantitative and case-study support for
their theory. Using rigorous statistical
methods, the authors show that since
1815, democratizing states have indeed
been more prone to start wars than either
 democracies or authoritarian regimes.
Categorizing transitions according to
whether they ended in full democracies
(as in the U.S. case) or in partial ones (as
in Germany in 1871-1918 or Pakistan
throughout its history), the authors find
that in the early years of democratic tran-
sitions, partial democracies-especially
those that get their institutions in the
wrong order-are indeed significantly
more likely to initiate wars. Mansfield
and Snyder then provide several succinct
stories of democratizing states that did
in fact go to war, such as the France of
Napoleon III (1852-7o), Serbia between
1877 and 1914, Ethiopia and Eritrea between
1998 and 2000, and Pakistan from 1947
to the present. In most of these cases, the
authors find what they expect: in these
democratizing states, domestic political
competition was intense. Politicians, vying
for power, appeased domestic hard-liners
by resorting to nationalistic appeals that
vilified foreigners, and these policies often
led to wars that were not in the countries'
strategic interests.
Although their argument would have
been strengthened by a few comparative
studies of democratizing states avoiding
war and of flil democracies and authori-
tarian states starting wars, Mansfield
and Snyder are persuasive. In part this is
because they carefully circumscribe their
claims. They acknowledge that some cases
are "false positives," that is, wars started
by states that have wrongly been classified
as democratizing, such as the Iran-Iraq
War, started by Iraq in 198o. They also
answer the most likely objections to their
argument. Some skeptics, for example,
might counter that Mansfield and Snyder
get the causality reversed: it is war or
the threat of it that prevents states from
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[125]
 John M Owen IV
becoming mature democracies. Others
might argue that democratizing states
become involved in more wars simply
because their internal instability tempts
foreign states to attack them-in other
words, that democratizers are more sinned
against than sinning. Analyzing data
from 1816 through 1992, Mansfield and
Snyder put paid to these alternative
explanations. Bad domestic institutions
usually precede wars, rather than vice
versa, and democratizing states usually
do the attacking.
Where does Electing to Fight leave
realism, the dominant theory of inter-
national conflict? The quantitative data
support the realist claims that major
powers are more likely to go to war than
minor ones and that the more equal are
the great powers, the more likely are
wars among them. But democratization
makes war more likely even after one takes
these factors into account. Furthermore,
the case studies suggest that democra-
tizing states very often lose more than
they gain from the wars they begin,
which implies that they do not respond
to international incentives as rationally
as realism would expect. That said, not-
withstanding its preference for viewing
states from the inside, the Mansfield-
Snyder theory is still "realist" in the general
sense that it assumes that politicians and
other actors are rationally self-interested.
Their self-interest simply involves build-
ing and maintaining domestic power as
well as external security-and sometimes
trading some of the latter in order to
gain the former.
The authors' conclusions for foreign
policy are straightforward. The United
States and other international actors should
continue to promote democracy, but they
[126] FOREIGN AFFAIRS
must strive to help democratizing states
implement reforms in the correct order. In
particular, popular elections ought not to
precede the building of institutions that will
check the baleful incentives for politicians
to call for war. Mansfield and Snyder are
unsparing toward well-intentioned organ-
izations that have pressured authoritarian
governments to rush to elections in the
past-often with disastrous consequences.
As the authors show, for example, it was
organizations such as the World Bank
and the National Democratic Institute
that pushed Burundi and Rwanda to in-
crease popular sovereignty in the early
199os-pressure that, as Mansfield and
Snyder argue, helped set off a chain of
events that led to genocide. Acknowledging
their intellectual debt to writers such as
Samuel Huntington (particularly his
1968 book PoliticalOrder in Changing
Societies) and Fareed Zakaria, Mansfield
and Snyder have written a deeply conser-
vative book. Sounding like Edmund Burke
on the French Revolution but substituting
statistics and measured prose for rhetorical
power, the authors counsel against abruptly
empowering people, since premature elec-
tions may well usher in domestic upheavals
that thrust the state outward against
its neighbors.
BACK IN BAGHDAD
This brings the conversation back to Iraq,
and in particular the notion that the United
States can turn it into a democracy at an
acceptable cost. In effect, Mansfield and
Snyder have raised the estimate of these
costs by pointing out one other reason this
effort may fail-a reason that few seem to
have thought of. Forget for a moment the
harrowing possibility of a Sunni-Shiite-
Kurdish civil war in Iraq. Set aside the
Volume 84 No.6
 Iraqand the DemocraticPeace
prospect of a Shiite-dominated state because Iraqis were dying but who are
aligning itself with Iran, Syria, and silent about the Iraqis who are dying
Lebanon's Hezbollah. What if, follow- now ought to reconsider their proud
ing the departure of U.S. troops, Iraq aloofness from the war. An aggressive
holds together but as an incomplete Iraq, prone to attack Kuwait, Iran, Saudi
democratizer, with broad suffrage but Arabia, Syria, or Israel, is in no one's
anemic state institutions? Such an Iraq interest. The odds may be long that Iraq
might well treat its own citizens better will ever turn into a mature democracy
than the Baathist regime did. Its treat- of the sort envisaged by the Bush admin-
ment of its neighbors, however, might istration. But those odds are lengthened
be just as bad. by the refusal of those states in Europe
Although Saddam was an unusually and the Middle East that could make a
bellicose and reckless tyrant, attacking difference actually to do so.0
Iran in 198o and Kuwait in 199o and
engaging in foolish brinkmanship with
the United States, as Mansfield and
Snyder imply, a democratic Iraq may
be no less bellicose and reckless. In the
near future, intensely competitive elites
there-secularists, leftists, moderates,
and both Shiite and Sunni Islamists-
could compete for popularity by stirring
up nationalism against one or more of
Iraq's neighbors. And Iraq lives in a
dangerous neighborhood. Already, Iraqi
Shiite parties have been critical of Sunni-
dominated Jordan; Iraqi Sunni parties,
of Shiite-dominated Iran; and Iraqi
Kurdish parties, of Turkey.
One hopes that the White House
contemplated this scenario prior to
March 2003. Whether it did or not,
the possibility must be considered now,
by U.S. civilian and military leaders,
academics, and U.S. allies who agree
with those academics. If Mansfield and
Snyder are correct about the bellicose
tendencies of young, incompletely de-
mocratized states, the stakes of Iraq's
transition are higher than most have
supposed. They are high enough, in
fact, that those who called so loudly
in the 199os for an end to UN sanctions

F O R E I G N A F FA I R S - November/December 200 S [127]