Who Says Democracies Don't Go to War?

"Seldom if ever has the hostility between academics and the U.S. president been so pronounced," writes John M. Owen IV in his review of Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder.  In the review, "Iraq and the Democratic Peace," which appears in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Owen states that the president has centered his foreign policy around (and justified the war in Iraq with) the theory, originated by Immanuel Kant and heralded by international relations scholars, that democracies do not fight with one another.  Owen uses the arguments in the book to try to answer the questions:

Why has a president who set his defining policy around one of political science's crown jewels come in for so much venom from the same academics who endorse the idea? After all, a host of peer-reviewed journal articles have implicitly supported the president's claim that a democratic Iraq would not threaten the United States or Israel, develop weapons of mass destruction, or sponsor terrorism. Are professors simply perpetual critics who refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their ideas? Or does Bush hatred trump social science?

The Bush administration's desire to break with its predecessors and alter the authoritarian status quo in the Middle East was admirable. But the White House got its science wrong, or at least not completely right: the democratic peace theory does not dictate that the United States can or should remake Iraq into a democracy. In Electing to fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, the veteran political scientists Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder make two critical points. Not only is turning authoritarian countries into democracies extremely difficult, much more so than the administration seems to have anticipated. The Middle East could also become a much more dangerous place if Washington and the rest of the world settle for a merely semidemocratic regime in Baghdad. Such an Iraq, Mansfield and Snyder imply, would be uncommonly likely to start wars—a bull in the Middle Eastern china shop. Unfortunately, such an Iraq may also be just what we are likely to end up with. . . .The authors' conclusions for foreign policy are straightforward. The United States and other international actors should continue to promote democracy, but they must strive to help democratizing states implement reforms in the correct order. In particular, popular elections ought not to precede the building of institutions that will check the baleful incentives for politicians to call for war.