- A year ago this weekend, the Bush administration was
making its final plans for its March 20 "shock and awe" bombing
blitz.
-
- Publicly, the administration continued to pitch the main
reason for war as the need to wipe out Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal
of weapons of mass destruction before terrorists could get their hands
on them.
-
- But another key, if less highlighted, goal was to
transform
the Middle East's dictatorships -- a fertile breeding ground for terrorists
-- into democracies. Iraq was going to be the demonstration project for
democracy, as well as America's new best friend in the region now that
the Saudis were suspect in certain circles.
-
- Among the rewards of friendship: The United States would
be able to move the troops that guard U.S. interests in the region --
including
oil -- from Saudi Arabia to Iraq.
-
- As the other justifications for the war, such as Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction stockpiles, evaporated like mirages in the
desert, the goal of establishing democracy took on even more importance
as a justification for the venture. But a year later -- and just months
before the United States plans to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis --
we are left with a muddle.
-
- The administration may well get that long-term military
base it wanted -- we disbanded Iraq's army and Iraqis may be too fearful
of Turkey and Iran to demand that U.S. troops pull out entirely anytime
soon. The prospect of our sowing democracy in Iraq, however -- never mind
the rest of the Middle East -- remains chancy.
-
- Violence in Iraq remains endemic, and the longstanding
animosity among its major ethnic factions -- Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds
-- remains strong and the biggest roadblock to stability.
-
- Iraq's just-signed interim constitution is the latest
example of the problems democracy faces in a country where the three major
factions dread being overrun by each other. It is clear that the Shiites
approved the document only grudgingly, after significant U.S. pressure
-- and on Friday, more than 1,000 Shiites took to the streets to protest
the constitution. But that problem is just one of many for a document meant
to provide a stable foundation on which Iraq can build its
democracy.
-
- The constitution attempts to ensure fair representation
for the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, but its often-baroque or unimaginative
solutions may prove unworkable, leading to a failed state.
-
- Take the executive branch. The constitution specifies
that the yet-to-be-elected parliament will choose a president and two vice
presidents in a single vote; the president will be the candidate with the
highest number of votes and his deputies will be the two runners-up. The
implicit expectation is that the three will include one Shiite, one Sunni
Arab, and one Kurd.
-
- The idea, of course, is to keep all three groups happy,
but you don't need a degree in political science to know that having three
leaders is unwieldy, at best, and impossible at worst. Confusing matters
further, the presidential council will have to make its decisions
unanimously,
a requirement that could hobble that body from making important decisions
at all.
-
- But the complications don't stop there. This presidential
council will appoint a prime minister, who will run the government on a
day-to-day basis. The presidential council can also dismiss the prime
minister,
a system that has failed elsewhere because of power struggles between the
leaders.
-
- In Pakistan, a similar provision allowed presidents to
dismiss two elected prime ministers in the 1990s, helping derail Pakistan's
fragile recovery from military dictatorship. In Iran during the 1980s,
factional fighting between the prime minister and the president grew so
fierce and proved so counterproductive that the office of prime minister
was abolished.
-
- Possible fatal flaw
-
- The constitution also prescribes a parliament with only
one house -- a possible fatal flaw in a country with a majority population,
the Shiites.
-
- If Shiites mainly vote for Shiite parties, they may well
be able to dominate parliament, allowing them to control all the major
committees and legislation. The beauty of a two-house structure, as in
the United States, is that one chamber can be set up so as to overrepresent
minorities and less-populous provinces, giving them more of a say.
-
- Iraq's unicameral structure is sure to exacerbate fears
by Sunnis and Kurds of what they have come to call ``a tyranny of the
Shiite
majority.'' The members of the presidential council cannot form the same
brake on such tyranny, if it occurs, because they will be elected by the
parliament and so will tend to make campaign pledges pleasing to the bulk
of legislators.
-
- The interim constitution also appears to have left many
controversial questions to be resolved later, among them the exact role
religion will play in Iraq. Already the young clerical firebrand Moqtader
al-Sadr has said the Islamic legal code, or Shariah, must be implemented
as the law of the land. Friday, Sadr called the constitution the "sale
of Iraq" and "a stamp of shame." And other fundamentalist
Muslims are likely to denounce the constitution and any secular laws it
produces as imperialist impositions and to appeal for Islamic law as more
authentic and indigenous.
-
- Kurds, secularists, most women and religious minorities
would all reject such a drive.
-
- Even a flawed constitution can get a country on the road
to democracy, but the chances of success are significantly improved if
political parties can work cooperatively to smooth the rough edges. In
the case of Iraq, however, parties are likely to be divisive rather than
sources of compromise.
-
- Because Saddam's Baathist one-party state took over for
its own purposes the universal ideologies available to Iraqis, of socialism
or Arab nationalism, dissidents -- fearful of his secret police -- turned
inward, to narrow ties of family, clan, tribe and religion.
-
- As a result, all of the major political parties now
active
in Iraq, with grass-roots organizations and the capacity to mobilize large
numbers of voters, have a narrow ethnic base. It is worrisome that most
of those parties also have paramilitary branches or militias. This
observation
holds true for the two major Kurdish parties, for Shiite groups like
Al-Dawa
and the Supreme Council, and for the small Sunni parties, whether they
are Arab nationalist or Islamist in orientation.
-
- The inability of Iraqis in the past 10 months to form
any major political party that has a realistic hope of competing for votes
throughout the country and of appealing across ethnic lines has
substantially
set back the prospects for democracy. The Communist Party is the only
nationwide
organization, but it is small.
-
- A huge gamble
-
- The fragmentation of the political scene could mean that
numerous small parties gain representation in the parliament, which will
have difficulty cobbling together a unified ruling coalition that can last
beyond the first vote on a divisive issue. In other words, deep ethnic
divisions in the larger society may just be acted out in parliament,
producing
paralysis.
-
- The Bush administration has taken a huge gamble in Iraq.
The Iraqis may just muddle through in returning to a parliamentary system.
But the rest of the Arabs, who resent centuries of Western dominance, will
probably resist Iraqi democracy as a model, since it will have a "Made
in America" tag on it.
-
- Given its unwieldy constitution and its outstanding
ethnic
disputes, Iraq could instead fall victim to gridlock or become another
Northern Ireland. If it does, the administration may well have discredited
democracy in the region.
-
- - Juan Cole is professor of modern Middle Eastern and
North African history at the University of Michigan and author of
"Sacred
Space and Holy War." He wrote this article for Perspective.
-
- © 2004 Mercury News and wire service sources. All
Rights Reserved.
-
- http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/8184232.htm
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