A New Iraq
By FOUAD AJAMI
January 26, 2005; Page A16
Wall Street Journal
On the morning after Iraq's elections, we now know, the insurgents will still be with us. And there will remain that denial among broad segments of the Arab intellectual and political elites, their stubborn belief that these elections are but an American veneer over Iraq's mayhem. We shall not be able to convince people with no democratic experience that Iraq is on the cusp of a new history. We shall have to look past those who call up the specter of the Shiite bogeyman and dismiss these elections as the first step toward a Shia theocracy. But set this election for a National Assembly against the background of Iraq's historical torment -- and against the background of an Arab world thrashing about for a new political way -- and one is forgiven the sense that Jan. 30 is a signal day in Iraqi history.
Constitutional monarchy isn't about to be restored to Iraq, but there are constitutional monarchists contesting this election. A Hashemite prince, who miraculously survived the regicide of 1958 as an infant 2 years of age, is on the ballot. Nor will the Communists prevail at the polls, but they are in the thick of things, a reminder that the Communist Party of Iraq was once the most active of the communist parties of the Arab East. There is a Kurdish electoral list, and a list or two of Arab nationalists. A list harks back to a leader who was overthrown and murdered in 1963, Gen. Abdul Kareem Qassem: he has haunted the country ever since, and there have stepped forth inheritors of his political legacy. One list is headed by Ghazi al-Yawar, the president of this interim government, a Sunni Arab from Mosul, a man of indisputable moral courage and a humane temperament that calls back all that was once good and measured in Arab life. Yet another is that of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a Shiite secularist who had had his start in the ranks of the Baath Party.
There is of course a Shiite slate, the United Iraqi List: it has the subtle endorsement of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The moving force behind that list is Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. The American regency broke with Mr. Chalabi, but he has found a big new role for himself. This is a broad political coalition, which includes powerful Shiite movements like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party. It is a sure thing that this list will fare well in Sunday's election. Millions of Shiites, it is safe to assume, will cast their votes. The ballot box is their means out of the subjugation of recent decades. One needn't wax poetic about the old, pre-Saddam Iraq. It had its cruelties, and failures. But there had at least been balance, and time-honored arrangements of power and property. The Shiites had once dominated the commerce of Baghdad and Basra, and their religious scholars in Najaf and Karbala had autonomy and security of life and possession. Even the Baath had once been an alliance of Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds and Christians. The Tikriti tyranny shredded the old order, and its saving graces. It wrote the Shiites out of the life of the land. These elections are a way for this disinherited majority to reclaim its place.
Behold these elections: they are not a prelude to civil war, as some of our sages continually warn. They are the substitute for a civil war. Indeed, the remarkable thing about the Shiites has been their restraint in the face of the terror that the remnants of the old regime and the jihadists have thrown at them. It is their leaders and their mosques and their weddings and their religious gatherings that have been the steady targets of the terror. It is their faith that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his band of killers continue to dismiss as a heresy at odds with Islam's "purity." Men are not angels. The Shiite restraint has rested on the hope that redemption shall come at the ballot box.
We needn't be afraid of a Shiite electoral victory. The scarecrow that stayed America's hand in the first Gulf War ought to be seen for what it is. There is no "sister republic" of the Iranian theocracy in Iraq's future. The religious scholars in Najaf know that theirs is a country that differs from Iran; it is a checkered country of multiple communities. The Shiite secularists know this as well. Besides, the Iranian state next door offers no panacea today, only terrible economic and cultural sterility. It has been Iraq's luck that Ayatollah Sistani was there when most needed. A jurist of deeply quietist bent who embodies Shiism's historical aversion to political redemptionism, he has reined in the passions of his community. He has held out the hope that history could be changed without large-scale violence, and without millenarianism. Grant the old man his due.
Admonitions have come America's way -- made by the Sunni order of power in neighboring Arab lands -- of the dangers of Shiite emancipation. It was in that vein that Jordan's monarch, Abdullah II, warned of a "Shia crescent" that would extend from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Our leaders tell us that similar fears are put to them by other Arab rulers. The power of the Arabist world view lingers in the State Department and in the ranks of the CIA, which retain a basic sympathy for the Sunni order. It is odd, to say the least, that we would fall for this trap. The terrors of Sept. 11, 2001, were not Shiite. Saudis and Egyptians brought soot and ruin to America; and it is a Jordanian from the town of Zarqa -- with Zarqawi as his nom de guerre -- who is sowing death in the streets of Iraq.
Young American soldiers are not dying in Iraq to uphold the sectarian phobias and privileges of the Arab elites. For if this campaign in Mesopotamia has a broader moral claim, it is to rid the Arabs of the atavisms that have poisoned their life. We can't underwrite Sunni dominion anymore than we can support Shiite radicalism. A Shiite bid to dominate Iraq is sure to be broken, turned back by the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds. Nor can we accept at face value the assumption that the Shiites of Iraq are a monolithic force. There are deep wells of anticlericalism among them. If the past is any guide, competing Shiite factions will cast about for alliances across the sectarian lines, among the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds.
* * *
It is no small irony that the American project for opening up the politics of the Arab world is being launched from Iraq. At first glance this would seem to be the most forbidding of landscapes. Arabs of my generation who came into political awareness in the '50s were raised to an idea of Iraq as a turbulent and merciless place. But this is the hand that history has dealt us. Americans may be strangers in the Arab world, but a bitter frustration with the ways of the Arabs, born of 9/11, has pushed America deeper into Arab life. That frustration has given urgency to a new determination to reform the Arab condition, to strike at that cluster of unreason and anti-Americanism that has poisoned Arab culture. We haven't been particularly skilled at that, and perhaps no foreign sword could cut the Gordian knot of an old, stubborn culture. But there is nobility in what is being attempted. Under Anglo-American protection, the Kurds, for decades the victims of official persecution, were able to build a decent, moderate political world in their ancestral north. Now the work of repair extends beyond the Kurds, and Iraq today represents the odd spectacle, a veritable reversal of intellectual galaxies, of a conservative American president proclaiming the gospel of liberty while liberals fall back on a surly belief that liberty can't travel, can't spread to Muslim lands.
Leave aside American liberalism's hostility to this venture and consider the multitudes of America's critics in Arab and European intellectual circles. It is they today who propagate a view of peoples and nations fit -- and unfit -- for democracy. It is they who speak of Iraq's "innate" violence. For their part, the men and women in Iraq -- who make their way to the ballot box, past the perpetrators of terror -- will be witnesses to the appeal of liberty. In their condescension, people given to dismissing these elections say that Iraq is the wrong place for a "Jeffersonian democracy." (Forgive the emptiness of that remark, for America itself is more of a Hamiltonian creation, but that is another matter.) No Jeffersonianism is needed here. A kind of wisdom has been given ordinary Iraqis -- an eagerness to be rid of the culture of statues and informers and terror. It takes no literacy in the writings of Mill and Locke to know the self-respect that comes with choosing one's rulers. Though it would not be precisely accurate to speak of the "restoration" of democracy in Iraq, older Iraqis have a memory of a more merciful history. Now Iraq has to be rehabilitated. These elections -- flawed, taking place alongside a raging insurgency -- are part of the rehabilitation of this deeply wounded country.
There is no need to dwell on the "demonstration effect" of this election, or on its meaning for other Arabs: it takes place under their gaze. Let Iraq's Arab neighbors draw their own conclusions about the legitimacy of political liberty. Let them see Iraqi women both vote and contend for seats in the assembly. Iraq is already the battleground between Arab authoritarianism and participatory politics. Its fate, we must know, will either embolden the forces of openness or sustain the autocrats in their argument that there is no alternative to their way.
"They can't vote. If anybody goes to vote, they will be killed," a spokesman for the large Dulaim tribe, in Sunni-dominated Anbar province recently said. Fair enough: an endeavor is often clarified by its enemies. That is the other vision of Iraq, and Iraqis know all too well its terrible harvest. History has cunning; some eight decades ago, the Shiites turned their backs on the new Iraqi state, and chose insurgency and a terrible anti-British campaign. The die was cast, and the Shiites lost: they were left with the legend of their revolt -- the 1920 rebellion, and its hollow consolations. The Sunni Arab political elites came into possession of Iraq. The Sunnis know this history. After their fury is spent, after the jihadists who crossed into their country are hunted down, there is sure to come to the Sunnis some reason and some compromise, a recognition that the old dominion is gone, and that the battered country will have to be shared.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at Johns Hopkins.
THAT'S ABSURD! The only people who are being forced to swallow democracy are the tyrannical leaders of the countries of the middle east. The people welcome it and swallow every morsel eagerly to such a degree that they are willing to risk death for the privilege.
