Resolved: the U.S. should intervene to promote democracy

Framework: I accept this framework, with a few caveats.While it’s true that I must oppose all types of interventions for the purposes of this debate, Pro must also defend all types of American pro-democratic interventions. The benefits and costs of the types of pro-democratic interventions the US is likely to engage in must be weighed together, and we must each show that the total benefits outweigh the costs or vice-versa. So, for example, if most types of intervention fail, and 1 type works, if the overall costs of American pro-democracy interventions outweigh the benefits, then I’ve fulfilled my BOP. So we must each show that the overall picture of American pro-democracy interventions favors our position. Military Intervention: Iraq Sanctions- While democracy was not the only goal of the Iraqi sanctions, it was one of them, as the 1997 Iraq Liberation Act stated. What were the results of this intervention? As a result of public health, nutrition, and sanitation declining, about 500,000 Iraqi children died due to the sanctions. [1] Iraq War- So far, there have been more than 100,000 civilian deaths caused by the Iraq War. [2] Living conditions have declined since the invasion, with poverty doubling since the invasion. [3] Unemployment has declined since the invasion, but has stagnated in recent years. The main growth has been in the public sector, which employs most full-time workers—private sector employment has declined. [4] Even just considering recent years, Iraq has not been improving, with the poverty rate staying flat at 22.9% from 2008-2010. [5] Afghanistan- An estimated 14,000-34,000 Afghani civilians have been killed so far in the war, with casualties increasing in recent years. [6] Living standards, as measured by the Human Development index, have declined or stagnated. [7] [8] While Pro’s statistics about peacekeeping are interesting, they are irrelevant to this debate. To be relevant to this debate, the intervention has to be 1) to promote democracy and 2) by the US Most of the interventions in his study either aren’t to promote democracy, or by the UN, rather than the US, or both.Power Differentials:There are two arguments here, 1) democratic movements are more likely to succeed with intervention and 2) intervening (or not intervening) in conflicts, like in Libya, sends signals to other regimes. For 1), see earlier and later points for the costs of US interventions promoting democracy, and the lack of benefits.For 2)—US intervention in Libya sends no such signal. Since the US doesn’t intervene when dictators it supports oppress or attack protesters, like in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the only signal intervention sends is that dictators should ally with the US, not that they shouldn’t attack protesters.Democratic Peace, Genocide:Markets vs. Democracy: Democracy is only correlated with peace in highly developed and literate countries. [9] (Which, of course, precludes any country the US intervenes in). Another study found the same results, and also noted that in the poorest quintile of democracies studied, democracy made countries significantly more likely to go to war. [10] This suggests that the US imposing democracy on a poor, illiberal country is unlikely to create peace.Autocratic Peace Theory: Studies suggest that autocratic regimes are also more peaceful to each other—suggesting that it isn’t democracy that causes peace, but rather similarity of regimes. [11] This would mean that changing a dictatorship to a democracy wouldn’t necessarily make that country more peaceful, but just make it more peaceful toward democracies and less toward autocratic regimes. Cold War: Joanne Gowa notes, "the democratic peace is a Cold War phenomenon: that is, the available data show that the democratic peace is limited in time to the years between 1946 and 1980. A democratic peace does not exist in the pre-1914 world, and it cannot be extrapolated to the post-Cold War era. As a result, to the extent that U.S. foreign policy is based on spreading democracy abroad to enhance international stability, it rests upon very weak foundations." [12] This suggests that democratic peace was the result of states allying together against the Soviet threat, not actually because of democracy itself. So imposing democracy in the post-Cold War era wouldn’t make countries more peaceful.Intrastate conflict: So 25 of the 29 recent (Note: Chart is from 2002) conflicts are religious or ethnic in nature. And in 23 of those 25, it was under a democratic regime—and in some cases, the conflict resulted in the overthrow of that democratic regime and its replacement with a dictatorship. This is because democracy tends to exacerbate underlying ethnic or religious problems in countries—groups vote along ethnic/religious lines, and use the power of the state to promote their group’s interests at the expense of other groups. And so the groups without political power resort to extra-political means.Democracies turning into dictatorships: Democracies, especially ones imposed on countries, have often turned into dictatorships worse than the ones that preceded democracies. Hiter’s Germany rising from the Weimar Republic is the most notorious example of this. Other examples of democracies turning into dictatorships include Spain, Portugal, post-czarist Russia, post-WWI Italy, Greece, Turkey, Guatamala, Argentina, Chile, Pakistan.While genocide rarely occurred under democracy, that doesn’t absolve democracy. If a democracy leads to a dictatorship that enacts the Holocaust, then sure, technically, it didn’t happen under a democracy, but it still happened because of democracy.Motives:Do we have a sort of Jekyll and Hyde government, switching back and forth between good and evil, selflessly promoting freedom for others and imposing tyranny on others to suit its own interests? (See Pro’s point that only 1/3 of US interventions are pro-liberalization) Of course not—what we have is a government that intervenes abroad for its own interests and its own interests only. Sometimes these interventions are nominally in support of “democracy”—but that doesn’t change the essential nature of the interventions or the American government. Is the Obama administration for freedom and democracy for the Libyan people, and for oppression and dictatorship for the Saudi people? Or is it more likely that one of these narratives is a fraud? And if so, which one? It seems more plausible that the President is actually for oppression and is lying about Libya, than that the President is actually for freedom and democracy, but is lying about Saudi Arabia. If the US government doesn’t actually care about helping people, how can we possibly expect them to succeed at doing so?Conclusion: As American pro-democracy interventions have, overall, failed in the past, and there's no reason to expect that the US has ever cared about helping people or ever will, America should not engage in pro-democratic interventions. Sources:[1] http://www.icrc.org...[2] http://www.iraqbodycount.org...[3] State of the World's Cities 2010/2011, UN[4] http://reliefweb.int...[5] http://planipolis.iiep.unesco.org...[6] http://bit.ly...[7] http://bit.ly...[8] http://bit.ly...[9] http://www.prio.no...[10] Mousseau, Michael (2005). "Comparing New Theory with Prior Beliefs: Market Civilization and the Democratic Peace". Conflict Management and Peace Science 22 (1): 63–77[11] Raknerud, Arvid; Hegre, Havard (1997). "The Hazard of War: Reassessing the Evidence for the Democratic Peace". Journal of Peace Research 34 (4): 385–404[12] Gowa, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1999), p. 113.