The front-rank argument in America's "war on terror" has become "democracy". This was not entirely a free choice. It was included in the package of the Second Iraqi War but it took a seat far in the back of WMD. No WMD, democracy advances to the first or second row.

In Afghanistan, revenge was the objective. Democracy there is pure form--the lovely sounding, and powerless, Loya Jirga, or national assembly--and unfettered wardlordism. US soldiers are in the country to squeeze the badlands with Pakistan in the hope of finding Osama bin Laden. This is the catharsis and the closure that America craves. The alternative to catching this man will be a heap of masturbatory Hollywood films with Osama bin Laden-look-alikes dying enveloped in napalm flames.

Nevertheless, bin Laden could be captured. There is no reason why millions of bucks should not be as alluring to Pashtuns as they have been to Iraqis. That Pashtuns have more Muslim faith than Iraqis could be significant. But the real issue to an observer is democracy itself. It is, so to speak, America's alternative to terrorism, but is democracy's historical record good enough for the task it is supposed to fulfill?

As every one who's had any schooling at all knows, democracy was born in ancient Athens where more than half the population were slaves and could not vote. This is not a serious disqualification or even a liability, because in the USA, where slavery was abolished constitutionally (1865), only half or less of potential voters normally bother to vote for congress. The American voting record is so abysmal that when the vote was extended to 18-year olds, through the 26th Amendment (1971), the proportion of abstainers increased so much that it skewed the continuity of election results, a nightmare for specialists on elections, called psephologists (from the Greek word for pebbles). It showed that not only do most young Americans tend not to vote but that they did not want to vote in the first place.

The main world problem since 1945 is poverty

American democracy is also encumbered by a meaningless electoral system, originally designed to introduce some proportionality in presidential voting results, which has resulted instead in the election of four candidates with less popular support than the loser: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and George W. Bush in 2000. However, for one thing, a flawed democracy has not prevented the USA from being the greatest and most prosperous nation in the world, and for another, America is trying to disseminate democracy because it cannot offer an alternative that will guarantee its own security, which is what ultimately it wants to achieve. So the question remains: what does history tell us about the goodness of democracy?

The record of Athens is patchy. Under democracy, Athens became the cradle of western civilization: the classic in artistry was defined (sculpture and the Parthenon), drama was born, and, incredibly in a city that might have reached tops 150,000 inhabitants, philosophy reached maturity. On the other hand, among the quarrelsome and militarily evenly matched Greek city-states, Athens tried to create an empire and was decisively defeated by Sparta in 404. Athens had the last word because it was also the birthplace of historiography, and Spartans, who were haughtily oligarchical, are known to us through Athenians and have become infamous for their eugenic practices, such as killing malformed babies; their "Maoist" collectivist lifestyle; and their ruthlessness (they eradicated permanently the city of Plataea). Just to round things out with an inuendoish touch, Athenians also described Spartan hoplites as long-haired and purple-cloaked, an ephebic je-ne-sais-quoi enveloping their masculinity. Given the ratio of slaves to citizens in Athens, oligarchy (or the rule of the few) was probably also the rule there, as it would be in the Roman republic. As we shall see, this is not as damning as it might sound.

Capitalism, or high-profit, high-accumulation economy, and democracy, in its original, oligarchical avatar, developed together in western civilization. Great Britain, the lead nation in economic development, remained thoroughly oligarchical at least until the Reform Bill of 1867 (and even this did not enfranchise farm laborers or women). There is no basis on which to claim that democracy as the rule of the "people" had anything to do with the leaps and bounds of the British economy after 1750. France did not lag far behind England in industrialization. It adopted "democratic ways" in the constitution of 1791, in which, as in Britain, property qualifications drastically reduced the number of eligible voters.

In many ways, economic development, or without mincing words, abject poverty, is the main world problem since 1945. (Before World War II it was generally thought to be in the order of things.) The Cold War came and went. The Israel/Palestine damnation is still with us, and seems fairly unsolvable. Naked power is trying to prevent it from escalating, which is one of the unmentionables of the war on terror. However, the problem of world poverty has been with us for longer and promises to outlast all of humanity's ills, in part because progress is so lopsided, in part because of what backward states do to make a hash of things. So, how does democracy stand up to this problem?

Dictatorship and economic development

You will not find among "nations in transition", the latest euphemistic equivalence to "third world" and "developing nations", a more democratic country than Venezuela. It has practiced democracy fairly since 1958. That makes 49 years of the continuous use of voting to achieve political changes. Why, even the actual French constitution was begotten after the coup d'état which brought Charles de Gaulle to power the same year that Venezuela became a fully democratic country. Greece had a military-rule interlude from 1967 to 1974. Francisco Franco, the Spanish caudillo, gave up the ghost in 1975. And Portugal shook off some radical velleities and became a functioning democracy in 1976, after having lived under the dictatorial regime of Francisco de Oliveira Salazar, which lasted from 1928 to 1968.

Under Franco and Salazar both Spain and Portugal grew in a slow but certain and orderly way and have become fully compliant members of the European Union. But Venezuela, which, besides democratic, is also one of the world's oil-wealthiest countries, has seen its economy start to descend in 1983, enter into a deep dive with each successive elected administration, and finally go into free fall in recent years. The Venezuelan currency, for decades (including dictatorships) at no lower than 4,50 to the dollar, is today free if unofficially floating at nearly 5,000 to the dollar. The Venezuelan economy shrinks with each passing year (dramatically in 2003), and Venezuelans, who once splurged in Miami, have become pathetically poor, their country visibly downgrading from a middle-ranking in development to some precarious niche hovering above the lowest category in the UN "human development index".

It could be said, probably correctly, that some special circumstances are at work in Venezuela. But let's look at the states that are really "in transition" or are really "developing", those which at the very least despise being considered third-world. Singapore emerged from poverty to dazzling prosperity under the iron-grip of Lee "Harry" Kuan Yew (1965-1990). It was not a dictatorship because in open elections held regularly Singaporeans showed their overwhelming trust in their leader, as well they could having him to thank for their independence and the excellent economic environment in which Singapore flourished. But for all its success, Singapore is too small to carry that much weight in a debate about democracy and development.

The Republic of Korea is another quantity altogether. It is a fairly large country and one that emerged from the ruins of war (1950-1953) to become a serious applicant for membership in the most exclusive club in history, the G7, formed by the biggest among the most economically advanced states in the world. South Korea began its economic soar under the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979), who was assassinated by the head of intelligence in his government. Military rule in Korea, sometimes atrociously repressive, lasted until 1987.

Though not quite as successful as South Korea, Thailand has been growing steadily for decades and is well past the bound of self-sustaining growth, at least in terms of internal capital accumulation. Thailand has been mostly ruled by the military and has only experienced elected civilian rule at intervals much longer than the brief periods of democracy. It seemed to have converted to democracy in 1997, but in 2006 the military intervened again and deposed the ruling prime minister.

What exactly is America peddling to the world?

For both South Korea and Thailand the nearness to real communist threat--North Korea and Vietnam respectively--might have been contributory to development in the sense of receiving special financial and trade considerations from the USA. But these capitalist privileges would not have been possible had Koreans and Thais not made substantial social contributions of their own, democracy certainly not being one of them. Indonesia is trailing Thailand and South Korea, but it too had sustained growth under the regime of Gen. Suharto (1965-1999), which fell not so much because it was dictatorial as because it was shamelessly nepotistic.

Democracy and development seem to go hand in hand in Malaysia, but it has been a democracy that, as in Singapore, put its trust in one-man rule, in this case the abrasive, authoritarian, but tartly honest Muhammad bin Mahathir, who was elected in 1981 and ruled until he decided to quit in 2003. India, the "biggest democracy in the world", as the saying goes, has also been among the poorest countries in the world. It is only in the last dozen years or so that it has started outpacing its habitual economic sluggishness and it was only in 2003 that it showed a really impressive growth rate of over 8%. Democracy in India seems finally to be paying off.

Like Diogenes, one could go on a search for an honest combination of democracy and economic development and come up with some correlations but it will mostly do so empty-handed. Argentina shot itself in the foot by going overboard for Perón back in the 1940s. One of the world's richest nations before World War II, the leading Latin American state in many respects, Argentina still seems to hanker for Peronism even as a meaningless tag. Despite his crimes, the tough dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, modeling himself on Franco, put his countrymen's noses to the grindstone and Chile is now reaping the benefits of economic discipline.

In Africa, it is useless to search for democracy or for models for economic development. If anything, the much-maligned and undemocratic one-party state has produced poverty and corruption but also has prevented some states from going the horrendous way of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

What then is America peddling when it promotes democracy, aside from the fervent hope of somehow curbing terrorism? One thing it cannot promise, as we have seen, is economic development, which is more often the result of authoritarianism than of rule by the ballot box.

Is it then democracy in itself as a superior political system? But in history democracy is hardly distinguishable from oligarchy. And in the USA today not only is democracy equivalent to decision-making by the minority who votes, but, since being a millionaire in America is a decided advantage in making it big in politics, American democracy is basically what is called plutocracy (from the Greek "plutos" meaning wealth). If plutocracy is good for the American economy, as Reagan and his epigone Bush the younger have said, and some facts have borne out, then long live plutocracy! In a last final democratic gasp, the best that can be said of democracy so-called is that electing rulers is better than having rulers who are motivated by personal ambition without checks and balances. I mean, even a plutocrat wouldn't want one his fellows making decisions he didn't agree with, would she/he?