If only Maliki were Jefferson
Oct 7th, 2008 by MESH
From Philip Carl Salzman
Peter W. Galbraith, in “Is This a ‘Victory’?” (in the current issue of The New York Review of Books), frets that there is no apparent way to “transform Iraq’s ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish Iran’s vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and Sunnis to Iraq’s new order.” It is apparent to him that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki is not “a Western-style democrat…, he is a Shiite militant from the hard-line Dawa Party.” He sees the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds each continuing to jockey for position and for maximum control. And in the Iraqi government, politics are in full play, various parties trying to hold or gain power. And Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, where presumably ethnic splits and political maneuvering did not exist, is shocked, shocked.
Let us leave aside Galbraith’s explicit shilling for the Democrats in the current election and his attempted refutation of the Republican position, although this appears to be much of the motive for the article. Rather, I want to focus on his criteria for assessment and on his analysis of the situation in Iraq.
Galbraith sets the bar to maximum height, judging according to “Western-style” democracy. Absent Westminster-class democracy, Iraq is a failure. To be a success, Iraq must look like Canada, or at least the Czech Republic. Is Galbraith’s a realistic and practical criterion to apply to Iraq?
Alternatively, we could consider the changes in Iraq as major steps toward a democratic system. From a personality-cult dictatorship maintained by a brutal secret police and the application of outlawed weapons against the populace, Iraq has been transformed into a parliamentary system with elected representatives. From the reins of power totally held by a minority ethnic group, with the great majority of the population marginalized, powerless, and often victimized, Iraq has moved to full enfranchisement of all Iraqis, with the majority Shiites carrying the greatest weight. All of this might not be good enough for Galbraith, but it is a big improvement for Iraqis.
Galbraith is aghast at the enmity between Shiites and Sunnis, and Arabs and Kurds (and Turkmen, although they remain unnamed in the article). Such conflicts are of course endemic to the region, having developed and been nurtured over thirteen hundred years. The wonder is not, as Galbraith would have us believe, that each group does not love the other as itself, but that attempts at accommodation remain part of the quest for control by each party. It is thus more reasonable to see the glass as half full, rather than broken into shards with the water run out and lost.
Galbraith points out that the Shia-dominated government sees the Sunni “Awakening Council” militias as “mortal enemies.” Perhaps so, and perhaps, as he says, the government is unwilling to integrate them, as requested by the Americans, into the Iraqi security forces. Is this proof positive of ultimate doom, as Galbraith seems to suggest? One important point is that the government realizes that it cannot deal with the Awakening militias the way it dealt with Sadr’s Mahdi army. It could suppress the Mahdi army militarily because this was a dispute among Shiites. Doing the same with the Awakening militias risked all-out civil war. Of course, the Americans support these militias, which would be a major factor discouraging the government from such a military initiative. The current position of the government is that it will integrate ten percent of the Awakening militia members into the security forces, and find other jobs for the other ninety percent. Will this work to everyone’s satisfaction? We do not know, but it is an attempt at a viable accommodation, and thus a step in the right direction.
Galbraith sees Shia-dominated Iraq as Iran’s greatest supporter. “Shiite religious parties … are Iran’s closest allies in the Middle East [and] control Iraq’s central government and the country’s oil-rich south.” But Galbraith does not mention that Maliki’s military initiative in Basra defeated and chased out of Iraq military operatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Galbraith is of course correct to emphasize the importance of Shia identity and loyalty. But he should also appreciate that the Shia-Sunni divide is not the only important opposition in the Middle East and in Iraq and Iran. There is no love lost between Arabs and Persians, who have been on-and-off rivals and antagonists throughout history. Nor have Arabs forgotten who were the first Muslims, and in what language the Quran is written. For their part, Persians have not forgotten that they were the established civilization and dominant force before Islam for thousands of years. Today many Persians, if not the theocratic elite, resent the arabization of their culture, going so far as to return to pre-Islamic the greetings of darood and bedrood in place of salaam and khuda hafez. Even leaving aside any sense of Iraqi nationalism, it is highly doubtful that the Iraqi Shiites would look with equanimity at Persian domination.
Americans, both in and out of the administration, have been a bit shocked that the Middle East has turned out to be rather different from Europe and North America. But is it not late in the game for observers such as Galbraith still to be uncritically applying Euro-American criteria to Iraq? It is more useful to apply realistic criteria of progress, by which measures we can take some pride in how far Iraq has come.
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4 Responses to “If only Maliki were Jefferson”
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I am probably the only person in North America who has not read “Is This a ‘Victory’?” by Peter Galbraith, but I am probably sufficiently familiar with his thinking to comment on Philip Carl Salzman’s remarks.
First, I imagine that Galbraith is still keen on Joseph Biden’s unrealistic wheeze of dividing Iraq into what they both think are its ‘natural’ constituent parts, Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite. An autonomous Kurdistan is fair enough, but any further attempts at partition are doomed to failure in spite of the ethnic cleansing that has taken place in Baghdad and other cities. Iraqis simply don’t live in the kinds of discrete sectarian units that would be a precondition for such an arrangement to work. The fighting around Basra earlier this year was intra-Shiite.
Of course in many ways Salzman is right: constant interference on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union in Iraq during the Cold War, a very weak state structure and some 35 years of Baathist dictatorship, mostly condoned by the United States, are not the best foundations for Jeffersonian democracy, nor would they be for Czech, or Argentinian, or Chilean democracy. Only those who were entirely ignorant of the recent history of the Middle East—a group including almost all those concerned with the ‘planning’ of the invasion of Iraq in 2002-03—could possibly have thought that some version of Western democracy would be a likely outcome. Even then, more troops and more serious attention to the ‘day after’ could well have brought about a more positive outcome.
Salzman says, and I agree with him, that things are somewhat better than they were. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was always a necessary precondition for progress in Iraq, and the majority of the population is now in some sense in charge. Where I part company with Salzman is his willingness to trot the tired out mantras of Sunni-Shiite hatred and Arab-Persian hatred “from time immemorial.” It just ain’t so, or at least it wasn’t always so. Sunnis and Shiites have coexisted, if often a bit warily, for most of Islamic history, and the differences between them were becoming less and less of an issue during the wave of secularism that spread over much of the Middle East in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In those years, intermarriage between Sunnis and Shiites was quite commonplace, both in Iraq and Lebanon. There are parallels; the general atmosphere of secularization in late 19th-century Germany produced a number of ‘mixed marriages’ between nominal Jews and nominal Christians, and nominal Muslims and nominal Christians married regularly in the former Yugoslavia. Sectarianism is rarely set in stone: relatively few Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland kill each other any more. Finally, religion in the Middle East is an accident of birth: it’s not a matter of choice. Sunnis and Shiites don’t seek to convert each other.
It’s pretty much the same with Arabs and Persians, who fought each other, OK, during the Ottoman-Safavid conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries, but not much since then. The Iran-Iraq war was one of Saddam Hussein’s frequent errors of judgement rather than symptomatic of anything deeper. While we’re here, I wasn’t quite sure why Salzman mentioned the substitution of darood and bedrood for salaam and khuda hafez: do I need to tell him that khuda is a Persian word?
The Awakening Councils are only a finger-in-the-dike solution. As the United States should remember from Afghanistan, it doesn’t actually help in the long run if you arm one group against another. Those Sunnis may not like Al Qaeda all that much, but they don’t like the Shiite politicians of Baghdad either.
And so on. Yes, Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein, but it would have been a damn sight better off without George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, the neo-cons and the assorted bunch of ignoramuses who were in charge for so long.
Peter Sluglett is professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Utah.
A very good point made in the post by Philip Carl Salzman concerns the distinction between civil war and manageable conflict. As he says, “the wonder is not… that each group does not love the other as itself, but that attempts at accommodation remain part of the quest for control by each party.” All too often, Western commentators who have seen signs of sectarian tensions in Iraq infer that a solution of total physical separation is urgently required. What is interesting in Iraq in terms of politics is that despite violence that can sometimes be described as sectarian, all parties south of Kurdistan continue to insist on a unified Iraq as the best framework for the future. As long as they do so, Iraq will remain fundamentally different from other cases of multi-ethnic and sectarian struggles such as the Balkans, and many of Peter Galbraith’s assumptions will be wrong.
Still, Galbraith may be right in voicing skepticism with regard to the relationship between some Shiite members of the Iraqi government and Iran. However, where things go seriously wrong in his essay is in the portrayal of Iraq’s Shiites as an undifferentiated mass. The description of the process towards new parliamentary elections is particularly misleading. According to Galbraith, “The Sunnis had demanded early provincial elections since they had boycotted the previous local elections in 2005… The Shiite-dominated parliament inserted a poison pill into the election law, a provision that would invalidate the ‘One Man, One Vote’ principle in the Kirkuk governorate… a system of equal representation for each of Kirkuk ‘s three communities.” In reality, the coalition that demanded elections consisted of Sunnis and Shiites, Islamists and secularists: they were Sadrists, Fadila, Iraqiyya, al-Hiwar al-Watani and others. And it was they too who inserted Galbraith’s “poison pill”—a somewhat surprising label from someone who has championed Kurdish veto rights and disproportionate influence in almost every other aspect of Iraqi government. Their stated goal was to preserve Kirkuk as an example of Iraqi cross-sectarian coexistence.
It is the existence of this sort of political alliance—it is now often referred to as the “Forces of 22 July”—that makes generalizations about a tripartite Iraq of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds meaningless. These forces now command a majority in the Iraqi parliament, and the Iraqi government can no longer afford to ignore them. It is however a potential problem that the United States prefers to support the government rather than the majority in the parliament in the current situation. Nouri al-Maliki shares the nationalist aspirations of many of these oppositionists but he continues to rely on a hollow alliance of federalists—chiefly the Kurds and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. If he does not realign himself towards the centre of parliamentary politics, he may have no other option left but to turn to increased authoritarianism or to Iran as the number of U.S. forces in Iraq is gradually reduced.
Reidar Visser is a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and editor of the Iraq website historiae.org.
My colleague Philip Carl Salzman writes:
Galbraith overstates this, but by the same token the events in Basra were rather more complicated than Phil suggests.
Iran’s influence in Iraq is multifaceted: Tehran simultaneously supports Maliki/al-Dawa, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), and Sadr. In Basra, therefore, Iraqi security forces (heavily penetrated by cadres from SIIC’s Badr Corps, which fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war and many of whose officers held IRGC commissions) fought a not-entirely-conclusive battle with the (also Iranian-supported) Jaysh al-Mahdi, ending in an (Iranian-mediated) ceasefire.
It is true that Arab identity and Iraqi nationalism among Iraqi Shi’ites represents an obstacle to “Persian domination.” However, the Iranians are smart enough to not push so hard as to appear to be seeking domination, but rather to position themselves as the funder, facilitator, and helpful fixer for a variety of Iraqi Shi’ite groups. They are also able to play up the threat posed by U.S.-supported Sunni “Awakening” militias. Both the IRGC and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security have proven highly adept at the covert part of this game, as has the Iranian foreign ministry at the more public part.
Rex Brynen is professor of political science at McGill University.
Peter Galbraith raised several important issues in his piece about whether Iraq represents a victory. For him it does not, yet for others, including some respondents here (notably Philip Carl Salzman), Iraq does represent a victory. In the current debate the key issue hinges first, on what qualifies as “democracy,” and second, on interpreting trends.
It is true and fair to say that there are numerous variations or styles of democracy, but that is not equivalent to saying that what is happening in Iraq meets the minimum functional definition (which, we might say, is a broad franchise). Overall, however, the question of whether Iraq is a democracy cannot actually be answered, since there is no widely agreed-upon general definition of what minimally counts as a democracy. For Galbraith, it is a Western-style, parliamentary and broadly representative government; these are the terms of reference that the Bush administration has used, so on this score Galbraith is right. Iraq does not yet meet these requirements. The Salzman comment uses questionable logic to say that even if Iraq is not a real democracy (whatever that means), it is so much more democratic than it was, and therefore Galbraith is wrong. It is not a sound argument.
Second, and more importantly for me, the Salzman response raises the issue of how to judge what is actually going on in Iraq. Salzman invokes the image of glasses half full or shattered, but the real difficulty is that the objective evidence can soundly support more than one interpretation. Galbraith regards Maliki’s moves as a kind of window dressing: Maliki is biding his time until the United States leaves, and then he will move to become the new Saddam in a state torn into three by the civil war. Salzman, however, sees the same moves as (a) a genuine transition to “Iraqi-flavored democracy” (whatever that means), or (b), at a minimum, at least an improvement over the Ba’ath Party (but what wouldn’t be?).
The bottom line here is that it is unwise and premature to rest much weight on Maliki’s words or deeds in relation to the democracy question (and to rest notions of victory on it), both because they support either interpretation and because “democracy” is too vague to serve well as an outcome variable. At this point it is not clear whether Maliki is steering his government toward a federal system or biding his time until the United States leaves. It is simply too soon to tell.
Monica Duffy Toft is a member of MESH.