Why We Need a Democratic Iraq

But one can also detect even on the pro-war side an anxiety about America’s assuming a serious democratic mission civilisatrice in the Middle East. There has been a distinct carefulness in the language of many senior Bush administration officials whenever the “d-word” comes up. The boldness of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz–“If we commit . . . forces, we’re not going to commit them for anything less than a free and democratic Iraq”–has not often been repeated. Do a Lexis-Nexis search for the words “democracy” and “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,” and you will see that Rumsfeld appears more comfortable juxtaposing “free” or “liberated” with Iraq.

Parsing the sentences of senior administration officials, of course, can be misleading and unfair. Until the presidential speech on February 26 at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner, President Bush had not clearly and forcefully put his mandate behind the democratic franchise in a post-Saddam Iraq. And even in that speech the president seemed careful not to overuse the word, preferring to describe an Iraqi society liberated from totalitarian crimes rather than one primed by America to enjoy the freedoms unique to democracies. Such distinctions are indeed quite similar to those made by many pro-American Iraqi exiles, who believe the United States’ primary role is to liberate them from tyranny, not to instill in them democratic virtues or monitor for long those virtues’ postwar application.

And any reservations senior U.S. officials may have about deeply committing America to the implantation of democracy in Iraq will likely be reinforced by the worker-bees at the State Department and the Pentagon, who will be directly responsible for policy on the ground. Foggy Bottom, which has never been wild about the war, does not appear to be bubbling with enthusiasm about the possibilities for the Arab world’s first democracy. Our traditional “allies” in the Arab world–Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan–aren’t fans of this war, and State naturally absorbs the reservations of the officials with whom it deals. American diplomacy always inclines toward preserving the status quo, and the Bush administration since 9/11 has adopted an approach to the Middle East–the Axis of Evil doctrine, the War on Terrorism, and the advocacy of greater individual liberty and democracy–that is enormously unsettling to the dictators and kings of the region, particularly to those aligned with us. Also, bureaucrats naturally think more about the problems and potential blame, than about the potential glory, that attaches to any situation. And it is easy to imagine what could go wrong in Iraq.

The Pentagon’s brass has similar biases and concerns, in addition to worrying about soldiers’ getting killed by Iraqis displeased with the postwar political order. And to the extent that the Central Intelligence Agency will play a role, particularly a policy role, in a liberated Iraq, its preferences will likely be even more undemocratic. In the early 1990s, the CIA threw its weight behind by the coup-plotters of the Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group rich in ex-military men. The INA’s coup d’état fell apart in 1996, but the CIA’s preference for the organization–for hard-nosed military types over democratic dreamers–remained. Though central intelligence director George Tenet may be in favor of a democratic Iraq, the foreign contacts and inclinations of the clandestine service, to which Tenet is always attentive, will probably work distinctly the other way.

IN OTHER WORDS, the soldiers, diplomats, and spooks may well fight a rearguard action against the president’s vision of a democratic Iraq, and the usual countervailing forces higher up, particularly within the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, may not decisively weigh in against the skeptics, because they, too, may have debilitating doubts. A “Free-Officer” governing council of anti-Saddam military men may start to look like the ideal provisional government–and we will soon discover that the entire Iraqi army, especially at the senior levels, is composed of anti-Saddam patriots. Such an arrangement would allow the Americans to leave quickly–and senior administration officials keep hinting that they really would like to be out of Iraq within “months, not years.”

In theory, this arrangement wouldn’t abort the ultimate democratic objective, particularly if such a council included well-known pro-democracy civilians, and the “Free Officers” issued heartfelt pro-democracy proclamations. Hoping for the best, America could depart, confident that it had left Iraq a vastly better place (true) and that it had allowed the Iraqi people, or at least more than one of them, to determine the country’s political future (also true). Privately, if not publicly, many within the administration–and the realpolitik crowd outside in America, Europe, and the Middle East–would be enormously relieved, believing Washington had actually left Iraq and the Middle East in a stable state, certainly more stable than it was with Saddam Hussein in power. America might not actually have left Iraq “free and democratic,” but the administration could plausibly argue that it had really only promised to put Iraq “on the road to democracy.” The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman and the Washington Post might huff and puff, but it’s hard to see the antiwar Democrats in Congress getting much traction on the issue. Final score: realpoliticians 1, neoconservative democratic idealists 0.

There are, however, two main problems with a scenario along these lines. First, it’s a decent bet that President Bush will not go along with it. He will have bucked the bureaucracies to go to war in Iraq, particularly the Department of State. He could well buck them again if they start to make arguments for a withdrawal from Iraq before it is evident that democratic institutions have a fighting chance there. The Reaganite evolution of George W. Bush since 9/11 suggests that the president sees “regime change” in Iraq in a profoundly philosophical way. If so, then pro-democracy Iraqi exiles who want the United States to transfer power to them prematurely, and senior U.S. officials who want to exit Iraq within months, have already lost their battles.

Second, and more important, advancing democracy in Iraq is the only way Washington can avoid that which the realpoliticians most fear: instability, or the “Lebanonization of Iraq.” This is so primarily for one reason. When the U.S. armed forces demolish or dissolve the Republican and Special Republican Guards corps, Washington will irretrievably destroy the old Ottoman political order in Mesopotamia, under which Sunni Arabs rule and Shia Arabs acquiesce. In modern Iraq, 60 to 65 percent of the population has humbled itself before 20 percent of the population. Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought, in part, to overturn this age-old Sunni-Shia arrangement–what Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami has called, “the social contract of the Arab world”–in his war of revenge and liberation against Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Khomeini failed because his Revolutionary Guards could not overcome Saddam’s Republican praetorians.

The United States will have no such problem. When the Republican Guards crack apart, the Shia quiescence in Iraq, which has lasted since the British put down the Shia-led “revolution of 1920,” will be over. (It in fact briefly ended in 1991, when the southern Shia region of Iraq led the rebellion against Saddam. When American tanks race through this Shia heartland on their way to Baghdad in the coming Gulf War, the defecting Shia Arab soldiers will likely pick up where their dead brothers stopped in 1991.)

The deconstruction of Baathist Iraq’s officer corps, which is overwhelmingly Sunni in its upper reaches, will follow, assuming Washington doesn’t try to intervene and save it. If Washington does do this–in the mistaken belief that the Iraqi officer corps is essential to preserve law and order in the country, or because surrounding “allied” Arab Sunni states beg it to–it’s a good bet that U.S. officials will unleash the internecine strife they most fear. Any transitional government in Iraq that includes as its core Sunni military officers, be they native “Free Officers” or returning exiles, will likewise probably light the fuse of Shia Arab resentment. Violent resistance is sure to follow.

IN OTHER WORDS, Washington must advance a democratic arrangement whereby the Shias can assume a political and military role that their numbers and social, cultural, and commercial prominence have long warranted. The Kurds, who have been even more abused than the Shias under Baathist rule, are also much more likely to respect a democratic regime that diminishes the power of the Sunni Arabs who’ve been lording it over them for decades. They will be much more likely to begin the integration, however slow and fitful, of their independent militias into a national army when they see that the Sunni Arab officer corps has been gutted and that Kurdish military men may aspire to high rank. The United States ought to ensure that Kurdish officers become senior officers as quickly as possible in any reconstituted Iraqi army. Ditto for the Turkomans and Christians. Ditto of course for the Shias.

The Sunni Arabs as a bloc may object to any democratic arrangement that so reduces their authority. The habit of authority is centuries old among them. Their habit of abusive use of power dates back way before the coming of the Baath and Saddam Hussein in 1968. Yet, the Sunnis too have been terrorized by Saddam’s totalitarianism. They know how he successfully attempted to keep their loyalty by playing the minority-solidarity card. They must surely fear that the Kurds and the Shias–especially the latter, who live among them in greater numbers throughout much of Iraq, including Baghdad–will want revenge for the years of Saddam’s barbarism.

Denied control of the Iraqi military–which in its rank and file is majority Shia–the Sunni Arabs will have nowhere to turn for protection but to a vigorous democratic, federal system that protects minority rights and allows them considerable control of their lives in areas where they predominate. In a post-Saddam Iraq, the Sunni Arabs could well be among the most committed democratic-nationalists, underscoring the Iraqi identity over ethnic and religious loyalties. The United States should encourage them to move in this direction by superannuating the senior grades (try colonel and up) in the officer corps, and massively shrinking the size of the army, which has preyed on civilian rule throughout the modern history of the country.

Iraq’s awful modern history is working in Washington’s favor. The country’s Shia Arabs do not yet have a ruling identity (they will, of course, quite quickly acquire a rebellious one). The Shia urban classes have never thought of themselves as rulers. Shia artists and intellectuals, who have greatly defined Iraq’s culture, at least those bits of it not pulverized by Saddam, don’t yet have any pretensions or post-Saddam grand designs. Intellectually, the diaspora may well own the Iraqi mind, and that diaspora appears to have reasonably strong democratic reflexes.

The main Shia religious institutions in Iraq, meanwhile, are in terrible shape, battered by Saddam’s secret police for decades. They, too, will have to figure out who they are and who are their flock. Their centuries-old aversion to politics, which was integral to their traditional faith and demanded by their Sunni overlords, may come to an end, perhaps quite quickly. Yet it is by no means clear that a return of political activism among the Shia, last seen during the 1920 rebellion against the British, would lead to fundamentalism or other dictatorship-friendly beliefs. The Iraqi Shia clergy were in the past an intellectually diverse group. That diversity will probably return, and with it serious debate about the propriety and purposes of political Islam. There may well be few Iraqi clerics who would want to emulate clerical Iran, where mullahs no longer are esteemed by the common man.

Nor is it clear that the radical Shia groups that defied Saddam’s rule–principally the clandestine guerrilla Dawa organization inside Iraq and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) headquartered in Tehran–will have significant followings in Iraq once Saddam is gone.

In sum, the Shia Arab identity is in flux. It could become democratic or dictatorial. The United States and its Iraqi friends–and among the truest of these is the Shia exile Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, the leading Iraqi pro-democracy umbrella group–have an enormous opportunity to encourage the Iraqi Shia Arabs to make the right choice. If they do so, no other force in Iraq, or outside the country, will likely have the strength to fell Iraqi democracy.

And on a grander scale, “the social contract of the Arab world” will no longer imply the domination of one people, one political party, one tribe, or one family over others. This is certainly the best, and may be the only effective, defense against the disease that struck us on 9/11. And if the administration is worried about the imminent prospect of clerical Iran’s going nuclear, it ought to do all it can to ensure that the Shia Arabs lead the way to Iraqi democracy. A democratic Iraq could conceivably accelerate a similar spirit inside Shia Iran, where the ruling clergy has so far successfully corralled the desire for freedom. If the Iranians, who consider themselves vastly superior to the Iraqis, look westward toward a successful democratic experiment, they may react with widespread shame and hope–for Iranians, essential revolutionary ingredients. Washington has very few non-military options for preempting a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic in Iran. It shouldn’t waste this one.

Nothing transcendent will ever come from Iraq, however, unless Washington takes the mundane preliminary step of destroying the current Iraqi officer corps. There are many other things that the United States must to do to clear the road to Iraqi democracy, but none is more essential or urgent. If the Bush administration attempts to leave Baghdad before finishing this task–and it seems naive to believe that the officer corps and army can be purged and rebuilt in “months”–then the odds are good that modern Iraq’s sad, violent history will not end with the death of Saddam Hussein. We can be certain that Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, will make us pay again in blood and tears for our fear of overturning the old order.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.