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Democracy in Iraq, Act II
By Patrick Basham
The good news is that the
Bush administration now acknowledges the failure of its
initial democratization policy in Iraq. The bad news is
that the White House now thinks it has a better idea.
The reality is that President George W Bush, having
rhetorically raised the democratic bar sky high, can
guarantee the Iraqi people, at best, nothing more than
Afghanistan-style democracy, and that's nothing to brag
about.
Act 1 of the attempt to democratize Iraq,
which you may have forgotten by now, unfolded as
follows:
During the summer, L Paul Bremer, Iraq's
civilian administrator, handpicked a Governing Council
to serve as a de facto interim government until national
elections were held. But the council is an advisory, not
a governing, body. Not only is security excluded from
the council's remit, but also Bremer retains veto power
over all of the council's decisions.
The council
was composed primarily along ethnic and religious lines,
thereby institutionalizing ethnic and religious
divisions. Iraqis dismissed the council as an unelected,
unrepresentative, and, therefore, an illegitimate puppet
of the American "occupation".
The protracted
steps taken to date toward developing a new constitution
have further made clear the fault lines in Iraqi
society. A preparatory committee failed to agree on
delegates to a constitutional convention and thus did
not meet a September 30 deadline to present a
recommendation to the Governing Council. The United
Nations Security Council subsequently requested that the
Governing Council propose a timetable for the drafting
of a constitution and subsequent democratic elections by
December 15.
But the White House correctly
forecasts that the mid-December deadline, and any future
deadlines, will pass without decisive action. Bush can't
afford to wait a couple of years, or more. He has an
election race to run next year.
Hence, act II.
All indications are that Bremer will dust off an
approach he rejected several months ago, that is, an
attempt to duplicate the democratic "gift" that the Bush
administration bestowed on newly-liberated Afghanistan.
That's the approach long favored by British Prime
Minister Tony Blair. In post-Taliban Afghanistan, a
UN-sponsored Grand Council of Afghani tribal elders,
held in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001, announced the
formation of an interim government and elected Hamid
Karzai as president.
In the Iraqi context,
Bremer would organize a comparable US-run conference
that appoints members of an interim Iraqi
administration. The interim administration, equipped
with real power, would run the day-to-day government for
a transitional period until a constitution is written
and elections are organized. Afghanistan, however,
provides an especially sobering reminder that democratic
seeds planted in inhospitable soil won't take root.
The current political outlook in Afghanistan is
uncertain, to say the least, despite the Bush
administration's pledge to reconstitute that country's
political system. Unfortunately, Karzai is little more
than the de facto mayor of Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Beyond there, Afghanistan is partitioned with tribal
warlords exercising dictatorial power over each region.
The Bonn conference set Afghanistan's first
democratic national election for June 2004 (although it
may now be postponed until at least 2005). There is
considerable concern within the State Department that
these elections will merely rubber-stamp and legalize
the warlords' de facto political fiefdoms.
Historian Amatzia Baram, an expert on modern
Iraqi politics, cautions: "As the US experience in
Afghanistan suggests, giving too much power to tribal
sheikhs may turn some of them into independent warlords
whom the central government will be unable to control."
But powerful, frequently illiberal, tribal and religious
political leadership is exactly what is in store for
Iraq under any foreseeable set of circumstances.
Applying the Afghani model will speed the
American withdrawal from Iraq and will be popular among
the Iraqi people. Both are good things. But let's not
pretend that a liberal democracy will spring to life in
Iraq. Even after the occupying forces abandon Iraq, its
economic woes, and those deep ethnic and religious
divisions will remain.
A foreign power can do
little to advance democracy's evolutionary clock beyond
the limits imposed by the domestic society's economic
and cultural development. This fact cannot be altered by
Washington's wishful thinking or noble intent. But it
can be acknowledged as a first step to lowering a
democratic bar that currently hovers dangerously high
over Iraq.
Patrick Basham is senior
fellow in the Center for Representative Government at
the Cato Institute
(Published with permission of the
Cato Institute)
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