onditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the
polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war
that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third
of the nation's territory. Just before election day, the insurgents
stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace,
staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools
that were to be polling places.
Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they
had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a
bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station.
The people scattered, then the line reformed. "This nation may be
falling apart," one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, "but by
voting we may help to hold it together."
Conditions were scarcely better in 1984, when Salvadorans got to vote
again. Nearly a fifth of the municipalities were not able to participate
in the elections because they were under guerrilla control. The
insurgents mined the roads to cut off bus service to 40 percent of the
country. Twenty bombs were planted around the town of San Miguel. Once
again, people voted with the sound of howitzers in the background.
Yet these elections proved how resilient democracy is, how even in
the most chaotic circumstances, meaningful elections can be held.
They produced a National Assembly, and a president, José Napoleón
Duarte. They gave the decent majority a chance to display their own
courage and dignity. War, tyranny and occupation sap dignity, but voting
restores it.
The elections achieved something else: They undermined the
insurgency. El Salvador wasn't transformed overnight. But with each
succeeding election into the early 90's, the rebels on the left and the
death squads on the right grew weaker, and finally peace was achieved,
and the entire hemisphere felt the effects.
I mention this case study because we are approaching election day in
Afghanistan on Oct. 9. Six days later, voter registration begins in
Iraq. Conditions in both places will be tense and chaotic. And in
Washington, a mood of bogus tough-mindedness has swept the political
class. As William Raspberry wrote yesterday in The Washington Post, "the
new consensus seems to be that bringing American-style democracy to Iraq
is no longer an achievable goal." We should just settle for what
John Kerry calls
"stability." We should be satisfied if some strongman comes in who can
restore order.
The people who make this argument pat themselves on the back for
being hard-headed, but the fact is they are naïve. They've got things
exactly backward. The reason we should work for full democracy in Iraq
and Afghanistan is not just because it's noble, but because it's
practical. It is easier to defeat an insurgency and restore order with
elections than without.
As we saw in El Salvador and as Iraqi insurgents understand,
elections suck the oxygen from a rebel army. They refute the claim that
violence is the best way to change things. Moreover, they produce
democratic leaders who are much better equipped to win an insurgency
war.
It's hard to beat an illegitimate insurgency with an illegitimate
dictatorship. Strongmen have to whip up ethnic nationalism to lure
soldiers to their side. They end up inciting blood feuds and reaping the
whirlwind.
A democratically elected leader, on the other hand, can do what
Duarte did. He can negotiate with rebels, invite them into the political
process and co-opt any legitimate grievances. He can rally people on all
sides of the political spectrum, who are united by their attachment to
the democratic idea. In Iraq, he can exploit the insurgents' greatest
weakness: they have no positive agenda.
Of course the situation in El Salvador is not easily comparable to
the situations in Afghanistan or Iraq. On the other hand, over the past
30-odd years, democracy has spread at the rate of one and a half nations
per year. It has spread among violence-racked nations and to 18 that are
desperately poor. And it has spread not only because it inspires, but
also because it works.
It's simply astounding that in the United States, the home of the
greatest and most effective democratic revolution, so many people have
come to regard democracy as a luxury-brand vehicle, suited only for the
culturally upscale, when it's really a sturdy truck, effective in
conditions both rough and smooth.