Iraqi Democracy Posted by: McQ
on Monday, September 26, 2005
David Ignatius writes about progress and expectations in Iraq. He tells of how the transition from the US taking the military lead in security operations to the Iraqis taking the military lead is going. All in all, it seems to be going well. One paragraph, however, struck me as the most interesting, because it is something I've been thinking about lately:
President Bush and other administration officials continue to speak about Iraqi democracy in glowing terms, but you don't hear similar language from the military. After watching Iraqi political infighting for more than two years, they're more cautious. "I think we'd be foolish to try to build this into an American democracy," says one general. "It's going to take a very different form and character." The military commanders have concluded that because Iraqis have such strong cultural antibodies to the American presence, the World War II model of occupation isn't relevant. They've sharply lowered expectations for what America can accomplish.
I've always wondered at those who thought we could build it into an "American democracy". On what do they base that optimism? What traditions exist in Iraq which mirror those we built our democracy upon?
I mean take for example one of the foundations of American democracy: religious freedom. It also flourishes in Iraq ... if you're Muslim. In other words, if Iraq is to be a democracy, it will be an Iraqi democracy ... whatever that means. But it does mean it will reflect the traditions, culture and beliefs of that particular population, not America. Ralph Peters sums it up well in his book "New Glory":
Iraq will remain an important testing ground, at least as much for Arab civilization as for democracy itself. Each election, however flawed, constitutes a milestone. Iraq will be a true democracy oly after the third or fourth national election - if the system is not perverted by then, reducing the ballot to a meaningless formality as in other Arab state. Yet there is reason to hope, and great cause to pray, that Iraq will prove that Arabs (and the country's more sophisticated Kurds) can build a functioning democracy."
I'd add it will only be a true democracy when it peacefully hands over power to a rival political party at least once as well.
Peters concludes:
"And then we will have to see how much freedom the electorate bestows upon itself—and how powre they willingly cede to their leaders."
It is that formula which will determine the flavor of any Iraqi democracy, and it may or may not be a flavor with which Americans are familiar ... or particularly happy.
So what to do? Ignatius quotes T.E. Lawrence early in the article, and the quote gives us a clue:
"It is better to let them do it themselves imperfectly than to do it yourself perfectly. It is their country, their way, and our time is short."
Peters, who's growing on me as far as his thinking in this particular area goes, says much the same:
"Let immature electorates live and learn—don't try to stop the projector in the middle of their movie".
And just as importantly, don't try to impose a version of democracy on Iraq that doesn't fit. Let the Iraqis learn to walk with all the pratt falls that entails. Be there to support them and advise them, but, as we all know, some of the hardest lessons of life are learned only with experience.
Just as we're working more and more toward taking the training wheels off of the Iraqi army, so we must do with the Iraqi government and, then, recognize that means we live with the will of the Iraqi people, whether we agree fully with their model or not. Of course the left will denounce anything but a full fledged American style democracy as an abject failure, but we shouldn't let the political rhetoric obscure the fact that just about any flavor of democracy in the Middle East is a step in the right direction for peace and stability in the region.
"I’d add it will only be a true democracy when it peacefully hands over power to a rival political party at least once as well."
I’ll dissent and say this is not a big deal. Japan’s LDP party has only been out of power for one year since the reconstruction after WWII ended. They seem to be doing okay. And I don’t think I need to point out the sheer number of terrible leaders like Hugo Chavez who’ve been democratically elected.
Japan’s LDP party has only been out of power for one year since the reconstruction after WWII ended.
I’d argue that has more to do with Japan’s homogeneous culture than anything else, and while it provides an exception, I don’t think it voids the rule, especially when considering a multiethnic, multisect (religion) society such as Iraq.
And I don’t think I need to point out the sheer number of terrible leaders like Hugo Chavez who’ve been democratically elected.
But that’s part of the experience process, isn’t it?
I made a similar observation after the Egyptian election regarding emergent democracy in the Middle East:
What results will most certainly have little resemblence to American, Canadian, European or even (hopefully) South American democracy. That’s actually not very important. What matters most is that the political structure reflects, as accurately as possible, the will of the governed, as the those who are currently governed see fit to express it. If that means some countries are theocracy well, that probably does not bode well for us. However, an energetic democacy, viz one that continually regenerates through frequent elections, would not be as foreboding since the governing body would constantly be held to account in meeting the desires of the electorate. The fact that this nascent process is beginning with elections, therefore, is encouraging in my mind.
The expectation that Iraqi (or Arab in general) democracy will look anything at all like Western Democracy is just setting up the entire endeavor to fail. It will likely take several years for the process to take strong root. But, I believe, with each successive generation the expectations of the governed populous will grow such that voting power and political prowess will become more highly valued than violent rehtoric and agitation.
I’ve always wondered at those who thought we could build it into an "American democracy".
It’s a strawman argument. Can you name for me a SINGLE PERSEON who "thought we could build it into an ’American democracy’" rather than an Iraqi democracy?
Speaking only for myself, I would be satisfied if Iraq evolved to be as democratic, but no more democratic than, say, Turkey.
There is so much distance and room between the horribleness of despotism and the modern western ideals of democracy—which the modern west fails to live up to on a regular basis—that Iraq can fall a long ways short of ideal western democracy and STILL be a long long LONG ways ahead of where they were in 2002.
People speak freely of democracy as some political panacea. In its most basic form, it is simply majority rule by citizens. Who can and cannot vote in a democracy is also arbitrary.
The USA is one step removed from this. The USA was formed as a republic, where citizens vote for representatives to laud and vote, within their deliberative body, their citizen’s will.
I think that it is implied that when we want to see "democracy" spread accross the globe, it is a democracy that resembles the one which our nation’s Founding Father’s established.
What makes the USA so very special, beyond its being a democratic republic, is the Constitution of the United States. The document defines the fine dynamics of our republic with detail. It also articulates particular rights of individual’s—The Bill of Rights—that supercede majority rule.
The most important and fundamental need of the new Iraqi government is strong document such as our Founding Father’s wrote. Without this, there will be no security for the various factions that occupy that country. If Iraq establishes a theocratic government, rather than a secular one where government and religions have the same "wall of separation" the democracy will become a despotic and tyranical regime.
The citizenry of Iraq are mostly Muslim’s. But, their are clear differences even within Islam. The previous government in Iraq was secular. Under the iron fisted control of Hussein’s Baathist party, freedoms were few.
The USA also has divided government, where power is not concentrated centrally. If Iraq establishes branches of government, without strong constitional restraints for the ruling majority, this will in itself alleviate despotic rule.
As Jefferson wrote,
It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one.
The problem with the USA’s intervention in Iraq to bring the song of democracy to that country and to the Middle East, is that we never really reasoned that democracy, in of itself, will not necessarily deliver freedom and liberty to all the people.
.... If Iraq establishes branches of government, without strong constitutional restraints for the ruling majority, this will not in of itself alleviate despotic rule. ...
The only ones who seem to think it was explicitly planned as a strictly "American-style" democracy are the ones who are against the idea of democracy in Iraq coming about by way of American intervention. Everyone else, from President Bush on down, has been on about the whole "Iraqi democracy with Iraqi traditions" thing since, well, March 2003.
Iraq’s rushed constitutional process has deepened ethnic and sectarian rifts and is likely to worsen the insurgency and hasten the country’s violent break-up, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said on Monday ...
President Bush and other administration officials continue to speak about Iraqi democracy in glowing terms, but you don’t hear similar language from the military. After watching Iraqi political infighting for more than two years, they’re more cautious. "I think we’d be foolish to try to build this into an American democracy," says one general.
What Abizaid and his commanders seem to fear most is that eroding political support for the war in the United States will undermine their strategy for a gradual transition to Iraqi control.
Now, see any connection? A causal one, perhaps? The reason that support is eroding at home is precisely because the Bush administration is lying to the American people about the "glowing" progress in Iraq.
The more interesting thing about the Ignatius article is its byline - Doha, Qatar. He is talking to the Centcom generals in; generals who must toe the party line; generals who couldn’t tell the truth even if they wanted to; generals who may not be receiving the truth in the first place.
The most interesting aspect of the article is how completely divorced from reality it is. Not once is the term Shiite used. Nor is the term Sunni used. Nor Kurd. Not once. And anyone who knows jack about Iraq knows that tribal loyalties are more important than national identity. And Tal Afar is hardly a sign of success; if anything, it is a sign of lack of progress toward building an Iraqi army.
This is from Inside the Pentagon, a newsletter republished on the site Defense and the National Interest, published 9/15/05:
Newsweek reported this week that the Defense Intelligence Agency has begun analyzing what might happen in Iraq if U.S. forces were reduced or eliminated there. The wargaming may support a delay in the drawdown to avoid a surge in insurgent violence or a civil war, the magazine reported.
Behind the scenes, many officers are cautioning that even under the best circumstances the emerging Iraqi army does not appear ready to fill the security vacuum left by departing U.S. troops, regardless of Casey’s earlier optimism.
While selected Iraqi units appear ready to fight without U.S. support, many of them are more loyal to their tribes than to a unified army, officials say. For example, with considerable support from the U.S. 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, units drawn primarily from the Kurdish pesh merga — a militia reportedly feared by many Arab fighters — recently led the charge in the Tal Afar area of Iraq, where hundreds of enemy fighters have been killed or detained. Many of those concerned about the fate of the national Iraqi army question the feasibility of efforts to create an institution that spans ethnic and religious lines. There is little sense of national purpose among the emerging forces and morale is often low, military officials said in interviews with ITP.
Any "success" in Tal Afar is due almost exclusively to Kurdish animosity towards Sunni fighters. It’s a sign of deep divisions in the country. Sure the Kurds are good at killing Arabs. But that is no reason to be optimistic about our chances at creating a national army. To the contrary, it is a reason to be pessimistic.
Of course, Ignatius is either too cowed or too stupid to mention who made up the Tal Afar forces.
The newsletter continues:
When U.S. commanders have attempted to partner with Iraqi units, at times they have found they could not rely on their local counterparts to fight against insurgents, several officers point out. In Sunni-dominated areas, American leaders have sometimes imported Shiite or Kurdish troops from other regions to help counter the resistance, as is the case in Tal Afar, officials say.
In the Sunni Triangle around Baghdad, “we’re going to have to use nationally recruited forces, not tribal [troops] from that area, because they simply are not able to break with their tribal affiliations,” says the active-duty senior officer. “They won’t arrest a friend of theirs if they catch him with a truckload of explosives in the car. Or worse, they’ll help the enemy.”
Yet the practice of bringing in troops from other areas may unintentionally invite revenge killings, or at the very least can aggravate ethnic tensions by using one group to police another, some defense officials and experts worry.
Likewise, if you brought a bunch of Sunni fighters to Basra and set them lose against a Shiite militia, the Sunnis would probably do pretty well, but that wouldn’t be a sign of progress either.
Creating a national army requires a whole new strategy, one that would involve a monumental effort:
The 115 Iraqi army and special police battalions already declared battle ready, each numbering about 700 troops, are dominated by Shiites and Kurds, including many former members of political militias, the [LA Times] reported. (Those numbers are still well short of the 185,000 troops a Pentagon spokesman recently cited for total Iraqi security forces, Reuters wire service reported early this month.)
“Creating a coalition out of” the roughly 150 tribes in Iraq “would require systematically mapping tribal structures, loyalties and blood feuds within and among tribal groups; identifying unresolved feuds; detecting the political inclinations of dominant tribes and their sources of power and legitimacy; and determining their ties to tribes in other countries, particularly in Iran, Syria and Turkey,” writes Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.
Any mention of doing that in the Ignatius article? No, of course not. The Bush administration simply doesn’t have the brains to do something this intelligent. (But I hear Mike Brown is looking for work - want a bet he shows up in Iraq?) But we have embedded US troops in the Tal Afar Iraqi units, Ignatius reports.
Big f’ing deal.
It gets worse.
Yet even among the better-trained forces, “the only people the Iraqi people will fight for are their tribes, their family members and their friends,” [Retired Green Beret Colonel] Schumacher asserts. “They’ll even fight for their U.S. friends. But they won’t fight for their country.”
Typically lacking in education, Iraqi men often come under “pressure from local clerics and insurgents to stop people from joining” the army, says Michael Janke, a former Navy SEAL who heads a contracting firm that provides security services to the U.S. military in Iraq.
Retired Army Col. David Hunt, a former airborne Ranger and Green Beret, sees a passivity in Iraqi troops that could take generations to reverse.
“They’re not a warrior people. They’re very submissive” after years of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s violent rule, says Hunt, who maintains contact with troops in Iraq as a security consultant. “We haven’t found the key to turning that around.”
Even after years of investment in training, “there’s no evidence the Iraqis can do this,” Hunt says.
And while you are right that the democracy has to be an Iraqi one, so too must the army. The problem is that by staying in Iraq, we are tainting the very persons who we expect to the lead the army. In other words, we have to get out before the Iraqi army will enjoy any legitmacy:
Selected Iraqi “institutions, including the police, the military and other security agencies, could well survive with different people, untainted by association with the U.S. occupation, emerging from within them to assert new leadership,” according to a recent report by Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.
“What emerges has to be of their invention and creation or it will not survive,” says retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a former armored cavalry officer who led troops in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Though the new Iraqi army will not meet American norms or standards, it will be forced to deal with the remnants of the insurgency, “which is actually a rebellion against our occupation,” he says.
Of course, Ignatius won’t tell you this either. Instead, we get this from Ignatius:
They think that strategy is beginning to pay off, but it will require several more years of hard work to stabilize the country.
No - David - by staying there several more years we simply make the problem worse, and taint those leaders whom we hope to rely on with the collaboration label. Staying only makes the problem worse.
To which Ignatius and his ilk would reply: If the problem gets worse, all the more reason to stay.
Ignatius and his way of thinking are part of the problem, not the solution. It’s time to wake up.
CIA experiment, you have been predicting this imminently for years and so far you are batting failure on each prediction. but someone win the lotto eventually so maybe things will turn out for you.
CIA experiment, you have been predicting this imminently for years and so far you are batting failure on each prediction. but someone win the lotto eventually so maybe things will turn out for you.
Clearly define your antecedent, Capt. What the hell does "this" mean.
My prediction at the beginning of the Iraq war was more or less the current situation. (I actually didn’t think it would be this bad.) I defy you to find one war supporter who predicted in March 2003 that things would be as bad as they are in September 2005.
Rumsfeld said we would be down to 30,000 troops by the end of 2003. And I betcha a nickel at the time you agreed with him.
Yes, sdk, that’s all fine. But it is still their opinion based on their study. And opinions, as you might know, aren’t "news" any more than Ignatius’ opinion, no matter how well considered is anything but an opinion.
I will be reasonably content if Iraq comes up with a government that acknowledges limitations on government power. If it winds up taking stuff away from one guy and giving it to the other guy just because, I will begin to despair
I am still not sure what your solution is Mkultra. Get out now? Reduce significantly the number of troops? To how many? When?
What would you do now were you in charge? Or are you content to argue that you were right in 2003? The decision tree continues whether your advice was taken or not. What are our options now, and which one would you select?
Withdraw all forces now. Yes, Iraq would descend further into civil war, but is that is what happens when you go into a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, tribal-based country, and overthrow the then existing political order. It is particularly likely to happen when u have no post-invasion plan. Anyway, the civil war began long ago. The difference if we were not there would be one of degree, not kind.
What bench mark are we waiting for? When the Iraqis can "defend" themselves from the insurgents? When they are at sufficient strength? These seem to be the goalposts, but the problems with this approach are many, and the wingers simply will not acknowledge them.
First, there is the problem - as noted above - that any force we create and train and equip will forever be tainted with stain of American involvement. It will never be legitimate in the eyes of the Iraqis.
Why don’t one of you wingers out there tell me why a U.S. trained and equipped force is going to be legitimate in the eyes of the powers that be in Iraq. It won’t, of course.
Second, as noted above, BushCo simply fails to be honest about the sectarian divides that make a truly national army, i.e., representative and intergrated, all but impossible. When it refers to the Iraqi army in Tal Afar, it does not mention the fact that the army is almost entirely Kurdish or Shiite. What it should be saying is that "Sunni forces were hit hard today by Kurdish and Shiite militiamen with the assistance of their sponsor, the United States."
Third, the longer we stay, the more we perpetuate the cycle of dependency. Why should the Iraqis fight for themselves when they have us? The Iraqis need to stand up and fight for their country. If they won’t, why should we?
These are of course only some of the problems, there are others. For instance, we are fighting on the side in the civil war that seeks to install a weak central government in a larger federal system. Yes - we are fighting - ironically - for the very thing that is probably the biggest threat to a strong, national army - a stronger federation of mini-states. Even more ironic, our foes in civil war - the Sunni guerillas and, to a lesser extent, Sadr’s supporters and the Mahdi army - are fighting to keep a strong central government. We are literally killing the very people are fighting to Keep Iraq from breaking into Kurdistan, an Iranian client state, and vast wasteland of sand.
There are other problems, of course. But what all share in common is that they are intractable. They will not go away over time if we simply "stay the course." Indeed, our presence makes many if not all of them worse.
In other words, we should leave because we are making these worse, not better. Will there be bloodshed after we leave? Yes. Will it be more than will be shed in the long run if we stay? No. Why? Because we can only do one thing: make the problem worse.
Most countries are unlike the USA in that they will switch constitutions several times...I’d expect nothing less for Iraq. So don’t worry so much about the current constitution.
Yes, sdk, that’s all fine. But it is still their opinion based on their study. And opinions, as you might know, aren’t "news" any more than Ignatius’ opinion, no matter how well considered is anything but an opinion.
That’s my only point. [McQ]
The referenced stories were reported as news by BBC and Reuter’s. By definition, and Op-Ed is an opinion peice (i.e., editorial). In addition to this, it was reporting on a study.
This is the rub McQ, based on what are you stating it’s an opinion? What facts are you refuting? What invalidates the study? Your opinion does not reference anything more sustantive than another opinion that you happen to agree with.
You seem to think I am right they are wrong ends the debate. Really?
Counter the specifics, and maybe I will be convinced. But, without any substance your claims are nonsense.
"The constitution is likely to fuel rather than dampen insurgency..."
One more time for those who refuse to see ... the word "likely" puts the conclusion in the opinion category.
Opinions, as such, aren’t news, regardless of who reports them to be. It’s one of the reasons "op/ed" pieces aren’t run as "news". They’re called what they are. Someone conducting a "study" in which they conclude something contrary to my opinion or someone elses doesn’t change their conclusion to something other than opinion.
There’s nothing to counter "specifically" in a statement which uses the term "likely". I can state it’s "unlikely" and my argument carries as much weight as he brings to his since neither of us has any way to prove themselves to be right.
News, in my opinion, is a fact driven relating of an event which has occurred. This is prognistication about the future based in a studied opinion. Trying to tell the future isn’t news. It’s opinion.
When it refers to the Iraqi army in Tal Afar, it does not mention the fact that the army is almost entirely Kurdish or Shiite. What it should be saying is that "Sunni forces were hit hard today by Kurdish and Shiite militiamen with the assistance of their sponsor, the United States."
Unfortunately, you lost your chance to "get out now" (i.e. September 2005) in November 2004.
That "chance" didn’t even exist in 2004-09. Kerry didn’t run as a get-out-now candidate; he ran as an "I’ll do 85% of all the same stuff this other idiot is doing, only better" candidate.
