Mariano Aguirre’s critique of Michael Ignatieff’s divergence from liberal orthodoxy is a politically correct deluge that is exceptionally opaque even by the standards of the genre. That opacity probably works in Aguirre’s favour, since his arguments, once reduced to comprehensible terms, are no more convincing than Ignatieff’s in the article that provoked Aguirre’s ire (“Who are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?”, New York Times Magazine, 26 June 2005).

Ignatieff has expressed sympathy for the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, and for the general proposition that the United States can and should promote democracy in other counties, by military intervention if necessary.

Aguirre’s critique rests on two propositions:

• that the flaws of America and American democracy leave the United States without the standing to promote democracy elsewhere
• that military force is an inappropriate and ineffective method of promoting democracy.

I will examine each of these propositions in turn, with (in the second case) particular reference to Iraq.

The United States and democracy promotion

Aguirre’s arguments in support of the first contention range from the superficially plausible to the bizarre. Among the latter is his view that

“the United States is not credible or welcome in many parts of the world as a promoter of democracy. Nor is its social and economic model seen as something to be copied in Europe or Canada … because of its lack of universal protection on health care, the death penalty, the insistence on the right to bear arms and so forth.”

No social model is universally admired or universally appropriate. But Aguirre’s critique of the United States here is misconceived and irrelevant – for democracy is not a social model but a process by which a nation builds a social model that suits its own needs and desires. American voters seem to prefer universal personal armament to universal health care; Aguirre may dislike this preference, but his disapproval of the choices made by American voters does not make America any less a democracy, and it does not make America’s democratic system any less appropriate as a model of governance elsewhere.

Different democracies will naturally adopt different policies, but that doesn’t mean one democracy is better than another – it means that voters in different places have different priorities and make different choices. Democracy is defined by processes, not outcomes, and democratic government is accountable to its voters, not to liberal orthodoxy.

Aguirre’s comment that “Ignatieff doesn’t speak about the Christian mobilisation and the manipulations of the right and their radio and TV networks that were so influential in the vote for Bush” is similarly irrelevant. Both conservatives and liberals did all they could to mobilise their support bases in the 2004 American election, and conservatives did this more effectively than liberals. This means, not that American democracy is fundamentally flawed, only that liberals need to re-evaluate their message and their way of delivering it.

Aguirre is on stronger ground with his extensive passages on torture, but even here he seems determined to sabotage his own argument with a curiously selective focus:

“We know what torture is ... (from) the Spanish inquisition, from the Nazi era, from Augusto Pinochet in Chile, from the apartheid police in South Africa, from Antonio Salazar in Portugal and Francisco Franco in Spain, from Mobutu Sese-Soko in Zaire and now from those digital snapshots of Abu Ghraib, all ‘reasonable people’ know what torture is.”

The examples here might make “reasonable people” wonder about Aguirre’s perspective: Abu Ghraib but not the decades of torture practiced by Saddam & Sons (which make the abuses of Abu Ghraib look like a somewhat extravagant fraternity hazing); the tortures of the Nazis are justly cited, but not those of Soviet Union; Salazar’s regime in Portugal and Franco’s in Spain, but not Romania’s Securitate and East Germany’s Stasi; nor do Kim Jong-Il, Khmer Rouge, Laurent Kabila, Robert Mugabe, or Fidel Castro. Are these exemptions coincidence? Only Aguirre knows for sure, but the skewing of his examples seems too consistent to be merely casual.

Moreover, “reasonable people” can and do disagree about what constitutes torture. All armies interrogate prisoners, and all interrogations involve some degree of discomfort. If this discomfort is pushed far enough, it becomes torture. There is no standard definition of exactly where that line lies. There is no doubt that the beatings, burnings, electric shocks and other abuses practiced by Saddam’s security services were torture. Are threats, humiliation, or sleep deprivation torture? At some point of severity, yes. Where exactly the line lies is a matter on which disagreement is inevitable.

Aguirre is horrified by Ignatieff’s concession that “if a terrorist has valuable information about a biological weapon that is going to explode in New York, then maybe the security forces could use some level of force on him.” Yet such cases appear in most discussions of torture, and the question of what to do has two answers: the “right” one (that torture is abominable and not to be practiced under any circumstances) and the “real” one (that under those circumstances it is justified to avert catastrophe). Our sense of righteousness demands the right answer, our instinct for survival demands the real answer.

Mariano Aguirre must know all this. His outrage seems to stem mainly from the fact that he would expect Ignatieff – the director of a centre for human-rights policy at a major university – to give the right answer, whereas instead he gives the real answer. Aguirre seems to object less to Ignatieff’s conclusions than to the idea of a person in his position stooping to discuss such questions, or even acknowledging that there are questions there to discuss.

Aguirre poses two questions: “should democracy be promoted from outside or must it develop from local conditions? And if it should be encouraged by external actors, who has the legitimacy to do this?” His review of America’s internal flaws and external sins seems aimed at demonstrating that America does not enjoy such legitimacy.

After the litany, though, Aguirre reverses himself, declaring that:

“there are many ways to help and promote democracy … Promoting civil-society organisations is one. Opening northern markets to southern goods and helping regional organisations such as the African Union to implement peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions are others. So are development aid, and following the recommendations of the Commission for Africa.”

Aguirre apparently believes that democracy can be promoted from outside, and that America does have the legitimacy to do this, as long as he approves of the methods used.

Ignatieff and Aguirre agree, then, that America can and should promote democracy abroad. Their dispute revolves around method. Ignatieff believes that military force can be effectively used to promote democracy, Aguirre favours trade, aid, and multilateral engagement. The error, in both cases, lies in the assumption that these methods are mutually exclusive.

Transitions from tyranny to functioning democracy do not happen overnight. They involve extended processes, and are almost always studded with periods of paralysis and regression. There are points in this process where external promotion of democracy is useless, even counterproductive; others where it is extremely helpful, even necessary. The most effective method of democracy promotion at any given place and time varies according to the specific circumstances of the country involved and its position on the course of democratic transition. Those who would promote democracy effectively need a varied menu of methods, and both Ignatieff’s methods and Aguirre’s have a place on that menu.

The United States, tyranny, and military force

The cases of Iraq and Afghanistan are key tests of the argument between Ignatieff and Aguirre. They each involve a narrower subset of the democracy-promotion effort: opposing tyranny by force.

The first step in any transition from tyranny to democracy is the removal of tyranny. The removal of tyranny does not create democracy, but it is a necessary first step in the transition to democracy. Such a move, whether by internal or external action, almost always involves violence, unless the tyranny has already reached an advanced stage of deterioration.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan were, before the military interventions of 2001 and 2003, ruled by tyrannies of the purest sort. Aguirre’s favoured methods of democracy promotion would have been completely useless in these cases, as they generally are against well-established tyrants.

The use of “soft” methods of democracy promotion in states under the heel of tyrants or in the grip of state failure may assuage the consciences of those who use them, but they do very little for the victims of tyranny. Promoting civil society organisations is useless in a society where the standard response to dissent is a bullet in the head. Development aid to states ruled by tyrants only reinforces the status quo. Opening markets does nothing for nations whose ability to produce goods and services has collapsed entirely or been hijacked by a tyrant for personal gain. Peacekeeping is a noble thing, but peace must be made before it can be kept.

Thus, in the case of true tyrannies and utterly failed states, the choice is between abandonment and military intervention. We can either wait for tyrannies to crumble from within, a process that can take decades, or we can overthrow the tyrants with military force. There is no meaningful middle road.

The Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq was as clumsy, inept, and embarrassing as it is possible for an intervention to be. The justifications for war were mendacious, the assumptions about post-conflict management stupendously naïve, the pre-war anti-diplomacy blustering, Abu Ghraib staggeringly and pointlessly stupid. In short, the administration made every mistake possible.

Still, despite the appalling mismanagement, one of the world’s most egregious tyrants is in a cell instead of a palace. Iraq is at least partially governed by an elected assembly, and a constitution is being written. The Kurds have not seceded, and the Shi’a community has shown remarkable maturity and commitment to a democratic process. Iraq has not achieved democracy, and the road toward that end will be long and difficult, but a monumental roadblock has been removed.

Iraq is beset by a bloody and persistent insurgency. But outside the wildest fantasies of the extreme left, the insurgency is driven by those who profited from tyranny and those who stand to gain from anarchy – not by noble ideals of nationalist resistance against foreign occupation.

Tyrants and their followers oppose democracy, because they fear it. The followers of vicious medieval ideologies oppose freedom, because they hate it. They will fight, and they will use violence. Those who would build democracy in Iraq must simultaneously struggle to build a viable state and to resist those who would destroy that state for their own ends.

The first struggle will involve aid and trade, support for civil society and the wisdom to know when it is time to stand back and let Iraqis make their own decisions. The second will involve military force, and until the Iraqi military is capable of protecting the new state, foreign forces – in this case American forces – must help them. To glorify this necessity would be, to use one of Aguirre’s favoured shuddering epithets, macho. To flee from it would be craven cowardice.

I opposed the Iraq war for a number of reasons: because I believed that with a little more time and some honest diplomacy, the worthy objective of removing Saddam Hussein from power could have been achieved in a truly multilateral setting; that the Bush administration was overstating the immediacy of the Saddam threat and the dependence of international terrorists on Iraqi support in particular and state support in general; and that the pro-war camp was grossly underestimating the difficulty of building a stable or even a functional government in postwar Iraq.

Most of all, I believed that the primary objective of the 9/11 attacks was to force an American occupation of Muslim territory, thus exposing United States forces to a war of attrition and providing a cloak of legitimacy for Islamic extremists. Despite all this, I do not support an early withdrawal from Iraq.

It is unlikely that Saddam would have fallen – whether to internal resistance or to external intervention – without violence and bloodshed. The Bush administration’s failures and errors have made the process far more difficult than it needed to be. That does not make flight a viable option. An early withdrawal would not benefit the Iraqis. The insurgency would not evaporate if American troops pulled out. It would intensify, as the insurgents moved for control of the state. International terrorism would not be reduced, but would intensify as well: retreat only emboldens foes.

The decision to go to war was made at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, but it was made, and America has made a commitment. The commitment must be honoured – even by those who, like me, didn’t approve of it. American forces should not withdraw until an elected Iraqi government believes that it no longer needs American military support.

The difficulty of the struggle to open a road toward democracy in Iraq does not mean that military force can never be of service to those who would promote democracy. Where true tyranny or state failure exist, no other means will suffice. But those who would use military force to remove tyranny or restore order to a failed state must learn other lessons: they must do a much better job of it than the Bush administration did; strive for the best outcome and prepare for the worst, basing plans on reality, not ideology; accept that even in the best case the outcome of intervention will not be democracy, but the removal of one obstacle on the long and tortuous road to democracy; recognise that success is not assured and may be hard to define, and that a steep price will be paid for either success or failure.

Despite its flaws, America must promote democracy: if only the perfect have the legitimacy to promote democracy, democracy will not be promoted, and those who struggle for democracy will be abandoned. America and the free world must promote democracy by all available means, including, where necessary, military force.

If America is to successfully promote democracy, oppose tyranny, and address the problems of failed states, it must take a middle course between the infantile machismo of the Bush administration and the whimpering appeasement of the Euro-weenies. America cannot dictate, and it must not retreat. America must find the wisdom and resources to lead. Leadership of a free world is never easy, because leadership in a free world can only come with the consent of those who are led, which means building a consensus in a divided world.

Such a consensus will not be built easily, but there are grounds on which the building process might begin. It is widely agreed that democracy should be promoted, and that tyranny should be opposed. We know that there is a range of methods by which these objectives can be accomplished, and that different methods are appropriate to different circumstances.

All but the Amerika-über-alles extremists agree that multilateral action is – when it is possible – better than unilateral action. Most can see that the United Nations charter’s rigid approach to national sovereignty, so necessary after the second world war, has become a shield behind which tyrants oppress their people with impunity, and desperately needs to be reassessed.

Within these general boundaries there is space for disagreement, and for a debate in which both Ignatieff’s views and Aguirre’s, along with many others, have a place. Aguirre calls Ignatieff “blind and wrong”, and this is a mistake. Neither Ignatieff nor Aguirre is blind, or wrong, and neither has a solution to the problems of promoting democracy and opposing tyranny.

Both thinkers and their respective supporters may each hold one integral piece of a larger puzzle. If those pieces do not fit together, that doesn’t mean one or the other must be thrown away, it means that we need to find the missing pieces that will link them. That search will require the best efforts of both Michael Ignatieff and Mariano Aguirre, and of all others who value human freedom.