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December 02, 2004

Democracy in Iraq

As we approach the Iraqi elections still scheduled for 30 January, the $64,000 question remains whether or not representative government can take hold in Iraq sufficiently to reduce the insurgency to the level of a minor nuisance. It is my belief that it can, but that our current strategy is not calculated to get us there. That does not necessarily mean that the elections will not help the situation in Iraq; shifting to a representative government is a process that will involve many events over a period of years, and the elections are a key event. But while they are necessary, they are not sufficient.
Most of the violence in Iraq can be attributed to the Sunni minority. Some are Ba'athist holdouts who want to return to the power they held under Hussein. Others are fearful that the Shi'ite majority will now use the power of the ballot to oppress the Sunnis just as the Sunnis oppressed the Shiites when Hussein was in power. There is only one solution to the first group: killing enough of them so that the remnants are insufficient to threaten the new government. But the first group is small relative to the second group. The vast majority of Sunnis don't necessarily care who is in power. Their concern is protecting their rights under a representative system that will be dominated by the Shiites. This is the eternal challenge of representative government: how to protect the rights of the minority while adhering to majority rule. Without careful consideration to that concern, it is impossible to gain the level of faith necessary for representative government to succeed.
The reader may object to my use of the term 'faith,' but that is a critical ingredient in any representative government. We just endured an election campaign during which both sides assured the electorate that the election of their opponent would lead to death, disaster, obesity, and sundry other disasters. Yet once the election was over, there were no riots in the street, nobody grabbed their gun to hold off the troops, and the rhetoric actually dialed down significantly from the highs of the campaign. If either side really believed that the victory of the other side would lead to the disasters they had predicted, why wouldn't they take steps to prevent it? Because they have faith in the system.
The U.S. government turns over every two to six years. Like clockwork, every two years we elect representatives, a third of our Senators, and a President every other time. While we've been doing it so long it's just a habit now, there is no mystical force that requires us to continue. The President holds the power to simply hold onto power by force in theory, given the unrivaled conventional strength of our military. So what prevents him from doing so? Faith. I don't think any President would be successful if he tried to cling to power through a coup, but I can't prove that, because none has ever tried. I suspect that most Americans believe, as I do, that an attempt to circumvent our republican processes would fail because the people simply wouldn't stand for it, but that ultimately comes down to a question of faith, not facts. The fact that we all believe that to be the case allows us to live without the concern we might have to test the proposition.
That faith is the result of more than 200 years of reasonably successful government. For all of our other problems, we can look back over American history to times like the terrible period from 1861-1865 when Americans died in wholesale lots or the confusing times from 1783-1787 when we tried to work out how we could govern ourselves, and know that the republic survived. History can go a long ways to calm people's fears; it's hard to argue that we're really in that much trouble when people look back to times when we really did face the threat of dissolution or defeat.
That same faith is oriented directly against us in Iraq. There is no history of self-rule there, not even the low-level town meetings that formed the bedrock of New England democracy in the eighteenth century. Worse, the history of Iraq does offer plenty of memories of oppression and misrule. Where Americans can look at government and equate it with a system that, for all its flaws, has provided a reasonably good life to many generations of Americans, Iraqis look at government and see something that has brought terror and death to many generations of Iraqis. Representative government may sound great, but most Iraqis have no frame of reference for it. While we may look at the Sunnis who fear democracy as strange, from their perspective we're asking them to make a pretty big leap of faith in abandoning a system that served them predictably for a new system that we say will be better for them, but that will certainly place them at the mercy of the Shiites at the ballot box.
Iraq also offers the problem of a different kind of faith: Islam. Where Christianity has historically separated church and state to varying degrees, Islam has no such provisions. Islam is a one-stop-shop of sorts, providing guidance on how to live your life in almost every sphere. Self-rule is a contradiction of sorts in Islam, where people are expected to submit to God's law in all things. While representative government is not necessarily incapable of coexisting with Islam, I'm not convinced we're spending nearly enough time considering how to make the two dovetail effectively. Religion is massively more important in Iraq than it is in America, and we ignore that fact at our peril.
It appears that the Shiites and Kurds have bought into the representative government plan. Democracy offers the Shiites a chance to rule, given their numbers, while representative government is still a vast improvement for the Kurds. This means that the disorder in Iraq is focused primarily in the Sunni areas. The Shiites and Kurds, seeing the elections as in their best interests, have little reason to risk their homes and their lives by hiding insurgents. The Sunnis see things differently.
Apparently one plan under consideration is to accept the Sunni intransigence and let them reap the consequences of disorder by having even less influence over the new Iraqi government as the disorder in Sunni areas prevents voting in great numbers. This strategy seems calculated only to perpetuate the current problem. Many Sunnis support the insurgency now because the risks of helping the insurgency seem smaller than the risks of supporting the new government. If the new government actually confirms or appears to confirm the Sunnis' fears regarding representative government, it will only encourage them to continue fighting.
While it is possible that the new Iraqi government could eventually batter the Sunnis into submission, that is hardly an appropriate way to start what is, for all intents and purposes, a new country. I suppose the hard feelings such treatment would engender might someday fade, but our own Civil War experience suggests that hard feelings from war don't fade quickly or cleanly. That also presupposes success against a Sunni resistance that would only grow worse in the face of a government perceived to be persecuting them, hardly a foregone conclusion.
Success in representative government depends on buy-in by all the major players. Just as the buy-in by Democrats and Republicans ensures the continued success of the American system, a successful Iraqi government will depend on buy-in by the three main ethnic groups in Iraq. Cutting the Sunnis out of the system is not guaranteed to prevent a new Iraqi government from succeeding, but it will raise the odds against it to a great degree for no good reason.
The elections should go on. Delaying the elections only requires the Coalition to remain in Iraq that much longer, when one of our key goals in Iraq should be getting out of the country as quickly as we feasibly can. But we shouldn't leave until a stable Iraqi government is in place, and that cannot occur until a majority of each of Iraq's three ethnic groups accept the legitimacy of the new system. Cutting the Sunnis out, even if only temporarily, will only increase the time we've got to spend in Iraq by years.