32 years ago I read a little text book, for a political science class, titled City Politics by Banfield and Wilson. It was a look at how city politics actually works. What I found was that government was a lot more complex than I thought. There were elected governments and there were shadow governments. And the shadow governments were often the governments that made the decisions about what the elected government did. Banfield and Wilson weren't spreading conspiracy theories. They looked hard at how decisions are really made. The shadow governments that Banfield and Wilson wrote about were often made up of our upstanding business leaders. They made many decisions that the public expected the elected, or hired, government officials to make. And Banfield and Wilson didn't even get into the shadow government of organized crime. City Politics made me aware of the amazingly complex ways we govern ourselves. It is not always clear as to who is running things. And that goes for dictators too.

Letter From Belgrade

Ari Fleischer's timing couldn't have been worse. Attempting to justify Washington's plans to invade Iraq without United Nations approval, the White House spokesman held up Serbia as a bright, shining example of successful US-sponsored regime change, arguing that NATO's 1999 bombing campaign weakened Slobodan Milosevic and hastened his fall from power. "I suppose he might still be there had it not been for NATO and the United States," Fleischer told reporters in Washington on March 10. "That was regime change in Serbia, wasn't it?"

Two days later in downtown Belgrade, the old regime bit back. Serbia's prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, the darling of the West and the man who had engineered Milosevic's ouster in October 2000, hobbled out of an armored limousine near his government's headquarters on the afternoon of March 12. On crutches and suffering from a broken tendon from a soccer injury, he was moving slowly. Barely out of his car, he was gunned down by a sniper with a high-powered rifle and died almost instantly.

The slaying, which officials here blamed on shady underworld and paramilitary groups tied to the Milosevic regime, dashed Serbs' hopes for their fragile and fledgling democracy and sparked fears of renewed chaos in this deeply troubled Balkan nation. And with Serbia languishing under a state of emergency and police hunting down gangsters with nicknames like the Godfather, the Idiot, the Rat and Bugsy, it also provided a cautionary lesson about the limits of regime change as Iraqis toppled statues of Saddam Hussein: Decapitating a brutal dictatorship does not a stable democracy make. At the very least, what is needed, but rarely happens, is a wholesale flushing out of the official and unofficial apparatus that keep dictators in power.

Regimes like Milosevic's and Hussein's are propped up not only by official state institutions but also by sprawling and overlapping matrixes of underworld criminal groups, shadowy commercial clans and quasi-legal paramilitary units. International sanctions and embargoes like those imposed on Serbia and Iraq tend to strengthen these elements, which are adept at the smuggling and subterfuge necessary to keep the economy puttering along. When such regimes fall, these hidden pillars of support--flush with cash, resources, muscle and firepower--maintain their power and influence. With civil society decimated and the economy devastated, they are usually the most powerful constituency around.

And this leaves the regime changers with a dilemma and a paradox. Directly taking on the hidden power structures runs the risk of renewed bloodshed and chaos. But cutting deals and co-opting these forces, as Washington did in Afghanistan and has suggested it will try to do in Iraq, allows hidden elements of the old regime to keep their power and pursue their own agendas. "The lesson of the last three years is that if a dictator disappears it is not the end of the job," Maurizio Massari, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's ambassador to Serbia-Montenegro, told me shortly after the assassination. "Regime change should not be confused with dictator change," Massari added. "Removing a dictator is a necessary but not sufficient condition for changing a regime."
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It's delusional to think that a dictator is the source of all power and that his removal changes the nature of the government. Or that you can remove the visible government and plug in a new democratic government with people that have not governed, while ignoring all the shadow governments that continue to exert their own power and control.

A Skewed History of Asia

On the Sunday before US troops seized the city of Baghdad, Paul Wolfowitz went on television to sell his vision for a future Middle East. A free Iraq, he said, would serve as a democratic beacon for the region just as Japan was the model for Asia. "The example of Japan, even in countries that had bitter memories of the Japanese, inspired many countries in East Asia to realize that they could master a free-market economy, that they could master democracy," he told Fox News Sunday.

Wolfowitz, who was President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is turning history on its head. Japan was not the inspiration for the democratic upsurge that swept through East Asia in the 1980s. Instead, it was the junior partner to the United States during the cold war, when Washington created an alliance of anticommunist dictators who supported American foreign policy while repressing their own people. Those policies didn't inspire democracy in Asia; if anything, they helped to stifle it.

The symbiotic relationship between Washington and Tokyo was forged in 1948, when the United States "reversed course" in its occupation of Japan to focus on the containment of communism. Almost overnight, US policy shifted from punishing Japanese bureaucrats and industrialists responsible for World War II to enlisting them in a global war against the Soviet Union and China. The shift was symbolized by Nobusuke Kishi, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Kishi was minister of commerce and industry in the wartime Tojo Cabinet and labeled a "Class A" war criminal for helping run Japan's colonial empire in Manchuria.

"The part of Japanese imperialism which was made powerless after the defeat in the war wanted, of course, to revive itself," Muto Ichiyo, a Japanese writer who worked closely with the US antiwar movement in the 1960s, once explained to me. "But they knew perfectly well that the situation had changed. They knew also that fighting against America again would be both impossible and purposeless. So they adopted a very clear-cut strategy: Japan will concentrate on the buildup of the economic base structure of imperialism, while America will practically rule Asia through its military forces." (...)

A more accurate analogy between postwar Asia and US policy today would be the United States installing friendly leaders in Baghdad willing to do US bidding in the Middle East, and subservient, pro-US governments providing the economic underpinning to the new US imperialism. Then, after decades of US-imposed "democracy," the Iraqi people would rise up to forge their own future. That's how long it took Asians to reject the idea that democracy doesn't grow out of the barrels of American guns.
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The US relied on members of the defeated government, in Japan as well as in Germany, to make up the core of the new peace time governments. I don't think this approach will play very well with the majority of Iraqis, particularly the Shiites. And that is just the visible government. What is the US doing about the shadow governments?

Wholesale screwing around with governments is like trying to fix a large machine and, when you take off the control panel, thousands of tiny springs go boinging all over the room. Now you have to find as many of those springs as you can and replace those that you can't find, or that are broken, and get them all back into the right place and keep the machine working at the same time. Good fucking luck.

It seems that we have two scenarios here. The first is that our fearful leaders don't believe any of the installing democracy bullshit and plan to govern with the gun. That's the cynical scenario. The other scenario is that they believe their press releases and that democracy will flourish and Iraq will be a little US. That's the delusional scenario. Which are we dealing with? I'm afraid that, from my little knot hole, it's the delusional scenario.

By the way, I was an Urban Planning major 32 years ago. City Politics was one of the things that made me realize that Urban Planning was an oxymoron and I then wandered off to do other things with my life.