Reflections on the Elections in Iraq

Can the election in Iraq actually work?

Generals are always well prepared to fight the last war. So are the rest of us. Iraq, we all knew, was becoming “another Vietnam,” just as we once feared Vietnam could become “another Munich.” I myself have long felt the plans of the so-called “neo-conservatives” to bring democracy to Iraq dangerously naïve. Didn’t we learn in Vietnam that you cannot impose democracy from without?

Perhaps. But somewhere before Munich gave way in popular imagination to Vietnam, outsiders nevertheless successfully imposed democracy on Germany, Austria, Japan, and many former British colonies.

Progressives—including me--also say democracy is a cultural thing, that to impose it on Arab and Muslim culture is a kind of imperialism. What Westerners thought desirable was rejected in Vietnam, after all. Wasn’t it? Many argue that democracy similarly violates Muslim culture. They point to the absence of a functioning democracy anywhere in the Arab world.

But only a few generations ago, it was as fashionable to argue democracy was incompatible with German traditions.

Thirty years after Saigon, we now see functioning democracies in Thailand, in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan, in the Philippines. It is harder now to believe it cannot work with Asian culture. Democracy was not on offer in Vietnam: the choice was military dictatorship or military dictatorship. Foreign support withdrawn, the more competent military won.

Saying Islam and democracy can’t mix is equally baseless. Muhammad was elected leader of Medina; the early Caliphs, his successors, were also elected. It is aristocracy that is alien: the equality of man is an essential Muslim doctrine. One of Islam’s criticisms of Christianity is its formal priesthood, which implies special privilege for a few: for Islam, all are equals before their creator.

It is hard, then, to see how Christian civilization fosters democracy in a way Muslim civilization does not.

Besides Christianity, there is the fabled classical heritage: the Wes tsupposes itself the inheritor of the democratic traditions of Greece. Not so: most of the Hellenized world, the empire of Alexander, from Alexandria to the Indus, converted to Islam in the seventh and eighth century, and the West was cut off for centuries. When classical traditions were recovered in the West, it was largely through Arab mediators. The world of Islam is the more direct inheritor of these Greek traditions.

Nor is Greece really the original home of democracy. That distinction probably belongs to Mesopotamia—ancient Iraq. Its early cities were participatory democracies long before Athens.

It is strange that the Muslim world, and Iraq, have lost very early and strong democratic traditions over the centuries. But Greece too knew military dictatorship as recently as the 1970s.

Now, without the notice it deserves, a stiff wind is blowing in the Arab world. The trend to democracy is everywhere, since the Cold War ended; but recent events in Iraq have probably hastened it, just as Paul Wolfowitz and the other “neo-cons” predicted. Saudi Arabia has just held its first-ever local elections. Oman held its second free elections at almost the same time. Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan, and Bahrain have held elections recently; Jordan’s monarchy proselytizes for democracy in the region generally.

And, speaking from this vantage point in the Persian Gulf, the man in the street and the driver in the taxi seem to genuinely want it. Everybody likes Karzai; nobody likes Saddam or the Taliban.

It may not be the neo-cons who are out of touch with foreign culture. It may be the Vietnam generation.

Democracy might yet be stillborn: fundamentalist Shiite movements might indeed sweep the polls. Hitler too was democratically elected, and Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolution in Iran had wide popular support.

But this is a vicious circle: it is the absence of democracy that sustains such movements. When opposition is prohibited, the agenda of any opposition movement must include violence. When political organization is outlawed, religious organizations provide the obvious cover. Compare Poland in the Cold War: the Catholic Church became the centre of resistance to the Communist regime. No wonder the commissars of China fear the Falun Gong.

Then, in a society where opposition is considered treason, a direct assault on authority is far riskier than attacking foreigners allied to them. Hence a domestic opposition may go after the US or “the West.”

So, there is good reason to believe that America’s project of democratizing Iraq can work not only for Iraq, but will really reduce the threat of terrorism against the US itself. And may be the first domino to rise in a renewed Near Orient. Iraq, after all, has a lot of oil, and Baghdad was once the capital of Islam. It ought to be a wealthy nation.

The Bush administration may still be wrong; to my mind it is still a pretty gutsy call. But at the least, this is not unthinking prejudice. There is method in their neo-conservatism.