Thoughts about democracy in Iraq

[MIKE BURN]

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KUWAIT CITY, April 9 -- Pro-Western reformers in the Arab world have long been gripped by the nagging worry that the arrival of democracy would not install a happy new era of freedom and prosperity. They fear it could elect a series of fundamentalist Islamic governments. And at some point in the next year or so, Iraq now looks likely to put that fear to the test.



The Belfast summit between President George W. Bush and his trusted ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, agreed on one key principle for Iraq's future -- that it should be run by the Iraqis themselves. It was "a false choice," Blair insisted, to debate whether the United Nations of the American and British forces in place should run the interim government.



"It will be run by the Iraqi people," Blair insisted. "From day one, we have that the Iraqi people are capable of running their own country," stressed Bush.



It is too often forgotten that Iraq has some experience of democracy. From 1931, when the British handed the reins of government to the constitutional monarchy of their First World War ally King Feisal, under Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim's coup of 1958, Iraq had elected parliaments, the rule of law and separation of powers. The British kept two military bases in the country, and considerable influence.



The period was in many ways a success. Under British tutelage, public health and education blossomed, and the ancient canal and irrigation systems were restored. Iraq had the liveliest and most free press in the Arab world, and Baghdad became a vibrant cultural center.



But like the British before him, King Feisal and his successors, and the longest serving Prime Minister Nuri Said, relied heavily on the Sunni minority to run the bureaucracy and the officer corps, to the resentment of the Shi'ite majority of the south, and the Kurds of the north. They also depended on the traditional tribal leaders as a counterweight to the labor and Communist movements in the fast-growing towns and cities. The monarchy was staunchly pro-Western, which proved a major factor in its overthrow by a pan-Arabist military coup.



The lessons here for the future are clear. The post-Saddam government will have be a federalist structure, with the wide autonomy for the Kurds and Shi'ites. It will need to keep a tight rein on its army. It will probably need to demonstrate that it is not a pawn of Western interests, particularly the American and British oil giants.



It will have to come to an accommodation with the tribes, which remain a powerful force of identity for at least half the population. And the tribal sheikhs, wooed with cash and promises in recent months by undercover British and U.S. agents, are already re-asserting their authority as the collapse of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Party leaves a vacuum of power.



In Basra this week, the British agreed with a leader of the Beni Hasan tribe that he would assemble and chair a new interim local administration, to clear the garbage, open the schools, handle food distribution and to start rebuilding a police force. In Najaf, tribal leaders and local teachers and doctors are working with the U.S. troops to re-open the schools and hospitals. Facts are being created on the ground and the new government will have to tread carefully.



But there is a worrying new factor that the old Iraqi monarchy never had to worry much about -- fundamentalist Islam.



Saddam tried to repress it, even as he began parroting Islamic slogans and building massive mosques. He failed, even among the Sunni, where the venerable Muslim Brotherhood has undergone a revival. Islamic parties have won around 20 percent of the vote in Kurdish elections. One of the most influential exile groups, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading opposition force among the Shiites, has been based in Tehran and absorbed many of the theocratic Islamic principles of the ayatollahs.



The fear that an Arab state brave enough to experiment with democracy would be overtaken by Islamic fundamentalism has worried Arab reformers since the Algerian elections of 1992, when the Army stepped in to block an Islamic victory at the polls. The remedy may have been worse than the cure; the subsequent civil war has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives.



Egypt's Hala Mustafa, a reformer who edits the pioneering quarterly journal 'Democracy', argues that democracy is too great a shock for the demoralized and impoverished Arab world, and that the ground must be carefully prepared through education, the media and the deliberate cultivation of civil society, public debate, political parties, and independent judiciary and public interest groups.



"In this country (Egypt), if you say 'Have free elections,' the next day you'll have the Islamists in power. No doubt about it. So you must first modernize and secularize to predispose society to democracy," she says.



In Iraq, faced with the immediate tasks of rebuilding and international clamor for a UN role and a swift end to Anglo-American military rule, there may not be time for such careful preparations. And thirty years of brutal Ba'athist rule is not the best preparation for the instant plunge into democracy. The worst outcome of all would be for Saddam to be replaced, with an electoral mandate, by someone whose real loyalty is to Osama bin-Laden.

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[Phil Frazier]

It's Sad



The USA helped Saddam gain power in the early 1980's. The USA , UK, Germany, France, Russia, China and other nations supplied weapons to Iraq to fight Iran. When the Kurds were gassed there was no outcry from any nation.



The USA instructed the ambassador to Iraq to tell Saddam that the USA didn't interfere with internal politcs of nations regarding his proposed invasion of Kuwait because he felt Kuwait was stealing oil from Iraq. It was a setup.



When the Shiites were slaughtered after G. Bush Sr. encoraged them to rise up but lifted not one finger to helped them, the nations just said, "Oh well." They all helped the regime stay in power. The Western powers kept the lower class Iraqis, mainly Shiites and Kurds down.



Now the very same powers that helped in keeping the regime in power and the majority of the people in poverty and misery have liberated them. It would amusing if not were not so pathetically sad.

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Edited by: Phil Frazier  at: 4/10/03 1:14:10 pm

[DreamTone7]

There are many reasons why the US went into Iraq. You two mention only some of them. But consider this: nobody forced Sadaam to oppress, torture and kill his people the way he did. Noboby forced him to buy/build WMD. If he had not done those things, it would have been very difficult, neigh impossible for the US to have justified going in there....and I seriously doubt we would have done so. Saddam set himself up, folks.



Now I suggest we put this all behind us.....though I do suspect that there will always be some who will refuse to. That is, until the next opportunity to stir up bad feelings and contention comes along.

[MIKE BURN]

Where are the WMD's?



Where are the big threatening army's?



It seems like the USA have a problem when

it comes to the justification of this war.