These are the two points.
Iraq deserved democracy of the more-or-less American sort complete with an independent judiciary, a federal system, pluralism, separation of faith and state, an unfettered media and, last but most certainly not least, robust free enterprise--of a properly regulated sort.
The war effort would not cost the taxpayers a doggone red cent. In fact, the US would make a profit since our companies would have an inside track on the post-war contracts including those for developing new oil fields.
Well, golly, gee, didn't that sound just grand?
Sure. If one was ignorant of such trivia as Iraqi history; the effects of prolonged internal war; the nature of Iraqi political, social, and ethnic dynamics; and the role of nationalism in the Iraqi concepts of self. Or, to put it simply and in translation: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
As if the displacement of Saddam Hussein's regime never occurred, the Iraqi government and military are favoring France in the award of contracts covering infrastructure repair and expansion as well as military procurement. In turning away from American companies and embracing French, the government of Nuri al-Malaki is not only rolling the clock back to the Seventies when France was the number one source of weapons, it is deliberately sticking its thumb in the eye of Uncle Sam.
The favoring of French companies is not so much a triumph of Nicholas Sarkozy's personal diplomacy as it is akin to declaring "great victory" as the American troops withdrew from Iraqi cities the other day. It is an expression of nationalism, of sovereignty. It is a carefully calculated gesture of ingratitude meant to solidify Maliki's credentials as a genuine Iraqi nationalist.
Maliki has ambitions. Further, he has made no attempt to hide this reality.
Chief among these is his stated desire to rid Iraq of the "consensus democracy" which was a product of the years of transition under the heavy-handed procounsulship of Paul Bremer. The current Iraqi prime minister admits that the consensus approach might have been necessary at the beginning of the post-Saddam, post-Baath period, but it has outlived its usefulness.
Maliki is now calling for an end to the special "set-asides" built into the constitution so as to "protect" the interests of the Kurds and Sunnis. In his view these prerogatives now endanger both "true democracy" in the country and the capacity of the central government to provide essential and basic services to the totality of the population.
Each of the three major ethnic or religious communities has been guaranteed a specific senior position in the central government with the result that the tripartite head must agree if anything major is to be done. It is a clone of the old system of allocation of offices employed in Lebanon before the comfortable arrangement was blown away in the several internal wars.
The same potential is resident within the current Iraqi situation as Maliki sees affairs. He is probably, almost certainly correct in this. While the "consensus" or office and power allocation scheme was necessary to get any organic instrument approved, it carries the germs of its own destruction within it.
Maliki proposes an accurate census be followed by a redrafting of the constitution along the lines of one person, one vote without any sort of "set asides" on the national level. The result of this would be to place the center of political power with the Shia majority. In principle this may be justified.
But, it is harder to do so in practice. The rub comes in the question of protecting the rights and, to be blunt, the community ego of the minority Sunnis and Kurds. The US has elaborate structures including the Supreme Court which carry the brief of protecting minorities against the tyranny of the majority. Even so the will of the majority often tramples both the sensitivities and the rights of the minority under foot.
Iraq does not have and will not develop in the near- to mid-term any similar institutions. There are no inherent mechanisms to assure that Sunnis and Kurds will not be ground into the dust as have been the small Christian communities in Iraq during recent months and years.
The Sunnis, who long enjoyed the exercise of power under the British and then after the Baathist overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, have no reason to believe that the Shia will treat them any more gently or with any more consideration than they treated the Shia during the long years of Sunni ascendancy. The Kurds are both very well aware of and proud of their ethnic and linguistic difference from the Arabs.
More, many Kurds are fully wedded to the idea of an independent Kurdistan as the governments of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq can attest. Under any sort of "one-person-one-vote" formula, the Kurds would have more reason than ever to seek merger with their compatriots (term used intentionally and advisedly) in Turkey and Iran.
This would, of course, send the balloon straight up, pronto.
The same would occur if the minority Sunnis appealed to their coreligionists in Saudi Arabia.
Nothing in al-Maliki's stated aspirations addresses either the Kurd or Sunni difficulty other than in terms of glittering generalities of no substance. His current over emphasis on nationalism and finger-flipping Independence from the US must be intended to counter the deep fissures which underlie the Iraqi national identity.
The validity of this approach is questionable. Both Sunnis and Kurds have demonstrated the continued will and ability to counter objectionable Shia driven central governmental acts by both the threat and use of violence.
The current capacity of the purportedly non-sectarian, non-ethnic security forces and army to be either a "school for citizenship" or an effective suppressant is open to question. So also is al-Maliki's ability to refrain from using these organs of state security as an instrument of Shia (and al-Maliki personally) domination.
An argument can be made for the desirability, even the necessity, of a strongman based central government with a few democratic trappings. This mode of autocracy wearing a skinny fig leaf of democratic respectability is commonplace throughout the Mideast and North Africa. Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Libya among others have relied on this approach for political and social stability. All have succeeded to a great extent.
In so far as Iraq has a political culture and history it is in the same mold. With the bloody overthrow of the British installed monarchy fifty years ago, Iraq became a one-party state in which dissent was poorly tolerated to say the least. The result was--until Saddam miscalculated disastrously with his launching of the Iraq-Iran War and, later, the invasion of Kuwait--a level of prosperity and stability enviable in the region.
The sanguinary effusion which followed the US invasion may have made the majority of Iraqis so war weary that the acceptance, even the eager embrace of another one-party state replete with the instruments of effective repression and some pretence of democracy is not out of the question. Al-Maliki may be counting on war weariness to bring his vision of the non-consensual democracy into existence.
His own very rapid rise from obscurity to power may have emboldened al-Maliki to believe that he has what it takes to be the strongman of Baghdad. He may be right. Or, he may not.
In any event there is no doubt that he intends to see his successful semi-coalition expand in the elections scheduled for next year. He may even be somewhat honest when he states that his "National Alliance For the State Of Law" is not a Shia instrument but rather a genuine aggregation of all Iraqis who seek a rule of law, not men nor clerics, nor outside influences.
His National Alliance has not yet provided either transparency, or a government and judicial system free of corruption, or any real coming together of the three major communities, and it may never do so. But, the National Alliance has and is creating an atmosphere of nationalism, national pride, and the appearance of national Independence even as American boots still churn the sands of Iraq.
This implies that al Maliki may have the capacity to carry off what he proposes. He may create a one-party state with both repression and aspects of democracy which will be stable or at least orderly. It is the best, realistic outcome the US government can hope for.
In the alternative, the nightmare one, Iraq dissolves under the lash of Kurdish independence, Sunni demanded intervention from Saudi Arabia and, finally, Iranian entrance to "protect" the Shia from "foreign" persecution.
Ain't democracy wonderful?
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