05/19/08:

DEMOCRACIES DON'T LET PEOPLE DIE: So true.

We (and other democracies, we're not the only one after all) may not be perfect, we sure did mess up Katrina, but I think even that was a far cry from what's going on in China and Burma. Not being able to find your butt with both hands for a few days too many is different than purposely withholding help from people who are in peril, it just IS.

Democracies Don't Let People Die
May 15, 2008

Next to Hillary Won't Quit, the least surprising news yesterday morning was the headline: China Rejects Quake Aid. Reasons on offer were that China wanted to prove its "self-reliance," difficult roads, blah, blah, blah. A virtual army of high-tech, highly skilled relief teams are ready to go into Wenchuan County, where mountains literally have fallen onto villages.

Meanwhile, even as a second storm headed toward the same Burmese people hit by last weekend's cyclone, its military junta, a government of almost cartoonlike cruelty, continued to tell the helping world to get lost. The U.N. is now talking of a death toll exceeding 100,000. We know that number to be unnecessary because India warned Burma about the cyclone two days before it hit.

When a China or Burma and its people are in the throes of such catastrophe, one is loath to make invidious comparisons.

Let's get to it.

Among the Western intellectual classes in the U.S. and Europe, there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush's proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies. Much of this has to do with the Iraq war and the apparently bottomless, neurotic antipathy to Mr. Bush. But make no mistake: The steady stream of pushback against "exporting democracy" as quixotic or inappropriate has gone far toward throwing out the democratic baby with the Bush bathwater.

Tectonic plates in motion don't distinguish between democracies and autocracies, but the record shows that getting hit by an earthquake or cyclone in an authoritarian government is a high-risk proposition for the survivors.

Communist China's Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was the 20th century's most devastating, killing 255,000. (All data here from U.S. Geological Survey.) Managua under the Somoza dictatorship in 1972: at least 5,000 dead and most of the city destroyed.

Mexico City's 1985 earthquake under the one-party PRI government killed 9,500 according to government estimates, but the toll is believed to have been much higher. Soviet Armenia 1988: 25,000 dead. In 2003 an earthquake in mullahfied Iran destroyed the ancient city of Bam and killed at least 31,000.

Common to all is that their governments never held real elections. In such places, after nature kills people, delay and incompetence kill the rest. Set aside idealism and the flowery rhetoric that must accompany a statement like the 2002 Bush Doctrine. The bottom line is accountability. In democracies, even poor or imperfect ones, public pressure, even outrage, pushes elected officials to act. In nondemocracies, the politicians don't give a damn because they don't have to.

Bureaucracies anywhere are lumpen, but in nondemocracies their sloth can be lethal. Their political masters, in office in perpetuity, are often corrupt, and so too are they. This, not poverty, is mainly why buildings like the Juyuan Middle School collapsed this week. In Bam just five years ago, many died because they were trapped beneath crude houses. Cement up to code isn't that expensive.

Bad people and bad cement exist everywhere. When they kill people in a democracy, the pressure of public outrage calls for heads to roll. After the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina, the head of FEMA went to the block, George Bush's approval rating collapsed and has never recovered. Arguably, one can divide the Bush presidency's status to before and after Katrina.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who saw his fill running Doctors Without Borders, suggested last week that disaster aid to Burma's government would be ripped off. Paul Wolfowitz, a democracy-addicted neocon, came to the World Bank arguing that authoritarian corruption was at the center of many developing-nation horrors. The Bank's bureaucracy drove him out. One wonders how many shoddy buildings their corrupt borrowers have tossed together.

Some will say, sorry, still not our problem. Indeed, Burma's saffron-robed monks last fall put their lives on the line to get a more accountable government. The watching world said little more than, "Good luck." Zimbabweans, their nation beggared and their election defiled by the autocrat Mugabe, also want basic accountability, but the aging democracies of the West have voiced nary a peep of support for these people.

In truth, we're often joined at the hip now to nondemocratic incompetence. Tainted heparin blood thinner from Chinese factories resulted in 81 U.S. deaths. Viruses are politically neutral. In a globalized world, we too are endangered by such governments.

There are no angels in politics. Absent accountability, though, a nation's people are at permanent risk. Democracy's greatest value may well be the average politician's cynical compulsion to survive the next election.

Posted by Deb on

Comments

[Nightshade]

Thank God there are true democracies like Zimbabwe that don't leave it to nature to kill people, but do the job themselves.