Exporting Democracy: What Have We Learned from Iraq?
Bengio, Ofra
FOUR YEARS AFTER the war for democracy in Iraq began, it is evident that the project has failed dismally. Many analysts attribute this to flawed implementation. Although there is no denying that...
...There were no competing parties to the Baath Party...
...IS THE IRAQI SITUATION completely hopeless...
...This vision of radical change did not take into account the fact that in Iraq civil society was nonexistent...
...But the processes of westernization and secularization in the Ottoman Empire started a hundred years before Ataturk, and they came out of Ottoman decisions...
...Now, factor in the heterogeneity of Iraqi society...
...OFRA BENGIO is senior research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and Africa Studies and senior lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University...
...no nongovernmental organizations to speak of...
...and, worst of all, the fragile middle class, which should have carried out democratic transformation, was dwindling due to ongoing wars, long years of sanctions, and the regime's socioeconomic policies...
...Other difficulties included the lack of a strong industrialized economy and a long history of political violence...
...The earlier British experiment does not provide an encouraging example...
...DISSENT / Spring 2007 43...
...Indeed, the true test of these democratic mechanisms will be when the Americans and their allies leave the region and when the government is changed in another round of elections...
...Not necessarily...
...These three visions clashed with each other and with a messianic American vision of democracy...
...Another ray of hope lies in the burgeoning democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan...
...Indeed, where there has been such separation in a Muslim country, democracy does have a chance, and the best example is Turkey...
...The Kurds' relative success is due to the fact that they managed to overcome their own semi-civil war in the 1990s and that they have now had a decade of experimentation in democratic processes...
...Islamic extremism received a significant boost after the fall of the Baath, and this made matters even worse...
...The most severe conceptual flaw was the belief that democracy can be imposed by force by an outside power...
...Had the project's architects taken these into account, they would not have opted to make Iraq the model democracy for the Arab world, even if only for lip service...
...This experiment, which was identified with Christian imperialism, failed and left severe scars in the Iraqi collective memory...
...Another conceptual flaw was the idea that one of the worst totalitarian regimes in the world could be transformed overnight into a democracy...
...They have authentic parties and insist on the separation of religion and state...
...When the dust of Sunni/Shia strife settles, a more representative government might be possible than the Sunni-dominated one that existed over the previous eighty-five years, simply because the Shias will never again accept disenfranchisement...
...And despite all the chaos, it is too soon to tell if it was worth the risk...
...It was Great Britain that attempted first to establish Westernstyle democracy in Iraq, beginning in the 1920s...
...By itself, this should not have been an obstacle to democratic development...
...If this democracy of sorts flourishes (although there are some less encouraging signs of late), it could become a model for the entire country...
...Although there is no denying that there were gross mistakes, the failure had much more to do with conceptual flaws and total lack of comprehension of, or worse still, disregard for Iraq's history and its problems...
...and (3) Sunnis came out vehemently against "dictatorship of the majority" and the "Shia agenda" for democracy because the two deprived the Sunnis of their past monopoly of power...
...In Iraq, by contrast, the fall of the Baathist regime gave new room to Islamist forces who exploited newfound freedom to reassert themselves rather than reinforce democracy...
...Iraqis remained suspicious of any similar projects emanating from the West...
...Consequently, when the Baath Party was ousted from power in April 2003, there were no organized domestic forces (except for the Kurds) capable of filling the vacuum and stabilizing the chaotic situation, a sine qua non for the functioning of any normal polity, let alone democracy...
...But the accompanying euphoria blinded many people to the fact that the Constitution remained controversial and that the elections were held under the watchful eyes and tight control of 130,000 soldiers...
...Complicating the picture further was the fact that the change was not the result of longterm internal evolution (as was the case in the Soviet Union, for example), but an abrupt act by an outside force...
...The United States did not create a Pandora's Box in Iraq, but it did open one...
...As a result, democracy in Iraq came to be identified with anarchy, rather than triggering a democratic domino effect throughout the region...
...Even with all the best intentions, the new American project could only have aroused, at least among some significant parts of the population, deep-seated fears of a new imperialism disguised by slogans of democracy...
...It is true that the new constitution of October 2005 is one of the most progressive in the region, and the general elections of December two months later were one of the freest...
...The problem is not that Islam is in itself incompatible with democracy, but that its tradi42 DISSENT / Spring 2007 tional lack of a separation between religion and state works against it...
...In the elections of December 2005, the majority of the votes went to religious parties, while the secular ones were pushed to the sidelines...
...She is the author of Saddam's Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (1998) and co - editor of Minorities and the State in the Arab World (1999) and The TurkishIsraeli Relation: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders (2004...
...But Iraq's historical, political, and ideological complexities produced in post-Saddam Iraq three competing visions or models of democracy that could not coexist with each other: (1) Shia religious groups wanted democracy for the majority, without separation of religion and state...
...Islamist forces, both Shias and Sunnis, were held in check by Saddam Hussein, and now they came out forcefully...
...2) the Kurds sought federative democracy and the separation of religion and state...
...The successful German and Japanese cases after the Second World War were completely irrelevant models for Iraq, where a combination of historical, political, social, and cultural factors doomed the American project from the start...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
