The domino effect

Something else struck me while reading the article on the Pentagon Papers and thinking about the PBS Watergate special. The article has a brief description of the "domino effect" that was predicted if we were not able to keep South Vietnam communist free.

Repeating language from a McNamara memorandum of March 16 to the President (language in part drawn in turn from a memorandum to McNamara on Jan. 22 from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor) the National Security Council document reflects the prevailing belief in what President Eisenhower had called the "domino effect" of the loss of South Vietnam.

Unless the objective is achieved in South Vietnam, it says, "almost all of Southeast Asia will probably fall under Communist dominance" or accommodate to Communism. The Philippines, it was judged, "would become shaky" and "the threat to India on the west, Australia and New Zealand to the South, and Taiwan, Korea, and Japan to the north would be greatly increased.

Watching the Watergate special, Alexander Butterfield, the Deputy Assistant to the President and an aide to H.R. Halderman, made a comment about how Nixon couldn't understand the "young people" and their opposition to the war: "Don't they know we're doing everything we can, that this is a proper mission? There is such a thing as the 'domino theory', everyone believed in that. Now we pooh-pooh it, but if one small nation falls, it's all easier for another to fall to Comunism. So we're over there to help these people to bolster themselves and fend off the North Vietnamese. He thought it was a noble thing to be doing. I mean, truly thought so."

It makes it sound as though the general concept of a "domino effect" has been discredited - that we no longer think that it holds true, which matches what I remember from my political science classes in high school. Yet when we listen to the most recent excuses given for the Iraqi war, its the same concept, but working for democracy, this time, instead of for communism.

Before and after the invasion of Iraq, proponents of the war evoked the vision of a virtuous ‘‘domino effect’’ toppling authoritarian regimes in the region and replacing them with modernizing, Western-oriented ‘‘democratic’’ ones.

This isn't something new, its been in the PNAC plans for years, and even Bush, himself, has been talking about it for a while.

The notion of a free Iraq as a catalyst for change in the region is not new. In a Feb. 26 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Bush said: "A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions."

But if the theory itself has been discredited, what makes them think that it's going to work any better this time? I would think that it would be obvious that even if a "domino effect" were feasible, the idea that our particular version of democracy (as opposed to whatever kind of democracy people in the Middle East may want) is going to be what spreads is highly unlikely, at best.

One of the reasons people were worried about the spread of communism was that the communists weren't afraid to invade any country they wanted to control, and then set up a repressive and functionally dictatorial government to run the nation. People might be allowed to "vote", but there would only be candidates for one part on the ballot, and the winners were pre-determined. With that level of control, it was easy for communism to rapidly spread.

Democracy, however, doesn't have that kind of control, which, while creating a great deal of freedom for the citizens of a democracy, also makes it harder for democracy to spread from one place to another. Communists can actually be democratically elected in a democratic country (and, at least theoretically, once they're in power, they can start closing down the system again to prevent the people from voting them back out), but people who are already living in a communist or otherwise repressive society don't have the ability to "vote" a democracy in. Their leader's just don't allow it. The only way for a democracy to get started is for the people within the country to overthrow the government or for an outside force to do it for them.

Am I missing something here? Is the domino theory not as discredited as I've thought? Please, help me out here, because I'm just plain lost.

Posted by thorswitch at August 3, 2003 07:37 AM | TrackBack