Ron DeSantis says ’48 hours’ in Iraq taught him it would never be a democracy

The United States invested many years, billions of dollars, and the best years of many military members and lives of many others in its actions in Iraq.

But the only military veteran in the presidential race says just a couple of days on the ground should have taught policymakers that the country would never be a Western-style democracy.

Citing the George W. Bush canard that the country had “weapons of mass destruction that didn’t necessarily materialize,” Ron DeSantis noted the mission evolved to a perceived need for “a democracy in Iraq.”

“So these are people that were thinking, you know, you can overthrow somebody and impose an American style democracy in the Middle East. I can tell you when you’re on the ground there for like 48 hours, you realize that was not in the cards,” DeSantis said Friday in Prosperity, South Carolina.

DeSantis was in Iraq in 2007, as Foreign Affairs notes, serving as a legal advisor amid a final surge of troops by the Bush administration, which invested political capital in its first term in what DeSantis vividly depicts as a failed effort now.

“What’s ended up happening is, you know, we were there for a long time. You now have the Iraqi government is basically a client of the Iranians,” the Governor said.

DeSantis went on to make the case that cultural differences meant that democracy couldn’t be exported in the way American leaders contended during the U.S. hyperpower era after the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

“They don’t think of freedom the same way we do. In that part of the world, they view freedom as submitting to Islamic law, Sharia law. That’s what they think freedom is. So they want a government to impose Islamic law on society and that’s their goal. Well, that’s not obviously what we would want,” DeSantis said.

He added that American leaders “had a lot of hubris in thinking what we could accomplish,” arguing that the United States “can’t socially engineer foreign societies.”

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