With violence and insurgency continuing in Iraq, television footage often presents the situation there as grim. Television cameras do not lie, but they also do not show the full perspective. Stability and security are lacking, but the situation in Iraq is more nuanced than it at first appears. Problems are complex. Some may be the unavoidable part of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, but many other setbacks are the results of Coalition mistakes which are correctible. Despite dire predictions of civil war and mass exodus, the Iraqi people continue to move the political process forward with remarkable resilience. Nevertheless, the challenges to a peaceful Iraq—let alone an Iraqi democracy—are vast.
Countering the Insurgency
There can be little positive development inside Iraq until security is restored. While French President Jacques Chirac and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggest engaging insurgents in negotiation, such suggestions belie the nature of the insurgency. There is no basis for the assumption that the insurgents represent a nationalist or political opposition, or that they enjoy substantial popularity. When the insurgents target police stations, Iraqi National Guard recruits, or school children, they are antagonizing a broad swath of the Iraqi population. After all, each Iraqi casualty has an extended family of perhaps 50, if not 100. While the same logic might apply to those killed by Coalition military action, U.S. forces do not intentionally target civilians. If Iraqi conspiracy theorists do not accept this, the fact remains that U.S. operations remain limited to specific areas like Fallujah.
Iraqi citizens regularly testify to the political bankruptcy of the insurgents. When cities like Najaf and Samarra emerged from insurgent control, residents told tales of abuses by Shi‘a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi and Sunni groups like Tawhid wa Jihad and Ansar al-Sunna. These Iraqis may not want permanent Coalition occupation but they also do not want to be abandoned to gangs which may claim an Islamist legitimacy but, in actuality, voice little political vision. Among Iraqis, the insurgents’ popularity decreases with distance. What the al-Jazeera satellite network labels resistance is only popular among those viewers in Cairo, Damascus, or Gaza who never need encounter them. If a stable, secure Iraq is the goal, legitimizing the insurgents through diplomatic contact might be the worse possible blunder.
The second common mischaracterization of the insurgency is its breadth. While the insurgents’ reach extends throughout most of Iraq, there is a tendency to correlate violence with support. This, in turn, can lead policymakers to recommend delay of elections which only fulfills the insurgents’ goals. Most insurgents employ violence because they want power, but realize they do not have the popular support to win it through the ballot box. When a car bomb explodes in Samarra, Baquba, or Kirkuk, it does not mean that insurgency has spread to those cities. The reason insurgents use car bombs is because cars have wheels. Analysts should differentiate between origination of terror and the location of its execution. If multinational forces and the interim Iraqi government focus on the origins of terrorism, rather than its expression, then counterinsurgency strategies will be more successful.
There is a tendency for many policymakers—especially those who have never been to Iraq—to recommend sending more troops to Iraq. Many of these analysts cite former Army Chief-of-Staff General Eric Shinseki who said the United States would need “several hundred thousand troops” to secure the country, and lambaste civilian Defense Department officials like Paul Wolfowitz for not flooding Iraq with American and Coalition soldiers.[1] This criticism is only partially justified. Iraq did not need more foreigners patrolling the street, ignorant of the local language and culture. More troops do not necessarily translate into greater security. Rather, they can simply provide more targets for the insurgents. Sometimes less can be more. In the 1980s, when the United States became embroiled in El Salvador, that Central American country was facing an insurgent challenge far greater than that which Iraq now confronts. El Salvador defeated its insurgency not with a massive influx of American troops, and without internationalization of the conflict, but rather by an El Salvadorization of the process. The success of the strategy in El Salvador was demonstrated by successful presidential elections in 1994, 1999, and 2004. Algerians also did not have the benefit of American troops or an international contingent when they fought their own Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) insurgency throughout the 1990s.
Accordingly, what is needed to stabilize Iraq is not an influx of foreign troops, but rather better trained Iraqi forces. Prior to the start of the war, the U.S. military did sponsor a training program. The Defense Department proposed creation of Free Iraqi Forces and established training facilities in Tazsar, Hungary. The failure of the Free Iraqi Forces to reach their potential was not due to a faulty concept, but rather to interagency wrangling in Washington. Senior State Department diplomats sought to delay the training program because they thought establishing an army in exile might undercut sensitive pre-war United Nations diplomacy. U.S. embassies in Europe slow rolled negotiation of marshalling agreements, delaying the transit of participants to Tazsar. Many American military officers, of rank up to and including USCENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks, also opposed the training program, unable to conceive Iraqis as allies rather than adversaries. To the credit of these uniformed servicemen, once introduced to the Iraqis, many officers praised the program and its participants. Given the large pool of recruits and the slow process of security screening and polygraphy, an earlier start to the training program might have enabled several thousand Iraqis to participate rather than a few dozen. Many conscripts in the Iraqi army might not have abandoned their posts and drifted away had they had the opportunity to ‘join’ an advancing, victorious free Iraqi battalion rather than surrender to a foreign army. The Free Iraqi Forces demonstrated their potential shortly after the invasion began. On March 29, 2003, a Fedayeen Saddam suicide bomber surrendered, not to American troops, but rather to the Free Iraqi Forces.[2] He later explained that surrendering to an Iraqi was more dignified. He could trust the Iraqi after he had established the Iraqi’s pedigree. A larger Iraqi contingent might also have prevented U.S. forces from chafing unnecessarily upon Iraqi nationalism. Iraqis stood in stunned silence when U.S. Corporal Edward Chin draped an American flag over the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdus Square, Baghdad. Had an Iraqi soldier draped an Iraqi flag over the hated statue as it was pulled down, the result would be an image of liberation rather than occupation. Washington may have erred in delaying the start of serious training programs for Iraqis but, with U.S. and NATO training underway, the benefits of this effort will increasingly be felt.
Border Security
In some instances, the U.S. could have used Coalition troops more effectively. The Coalition did not adequately seal Iraq’s borders. In September 2003, General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne in Mosul, went so far as to brag to a visiting delegation of think-tank scholars that under his watch, Iraq-Syria trade had never been higher. At the time, U.S. forces along the border had no way to verify the passports and identification documents used by Syrian truck drivers were real. Even after problems emerged with the porousness of the border, local commanders tended to deny the problem. Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Colonel Michael Linnington, for example, argued that he had secured the border until General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped forward and acknowledged the problem.[3] Turkish forces might have made a very positive contribution to border security along the Syrian frontier in Iraq’s al-Anbar province, but Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer personally vetoed any Turkish role in October 2003, after the Turkish Grand National Assembly voted to authorize a contribution. Unfortunately, Bremer was motivated by personal antipathy toward Turkey, which grew more marked after the controversial July 4, 2003, incident in which U.S. forces detained a Turkish Special Forces detachment which had entered Iraq without coordinating with U.S. forces. While the Iraqi Kurds publicly opposed a Turkish contribution, both the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan were a great deal more flexible. Both agreed privately to allow a Turkish contingent to join the Coalition contingent in Iraq on the condition that Turkish forces were neither based in northern Iraq nor Tikrit (which they deemed too close to Kirkuk) and so long as Americans rather than Turks controlled the supply lines.
Along the Iranian border, as well, Coalition forces failed to provide adequate security. In July 2003, Arabs and Iraqi Kurds alike warned that Iranian intelligence was taking advantage of American “naïveté” and Coalition failure to secure the borders. Iraqis from southern provinces said that during the first three months since Iraq’s liberation, over ten thousand Iranians had entered Iraq. While Coalition officials seemed unconcerned, suggesting that the influx was simply Iraqi refugees returning home, Iraqis could not understand how American diplomats failed to differentiate between returnees speaking Iraqi Arabic, and Iranians speaking Persian and little or no Arabic. At the Munthiriya border post 110 miles east of Baghdad, American soldiers inspected documents of Iranians waiting to enter Iraq. But, as along the Syrian border, there was little way to authenticate documents, despite ample evidence that Iranians were streaming into the country.
Diplomats and academics shrug off Iranian malfeasance and suggest that it would not be possible to seal Iraq’s 1,450-kilometer border with Iran. But, according to former Iraqi military officials once entrusted with border security, this simply is not true. They say that to claim that the border is too porous is disingenuous, since Iraq has built a paved road that parallels the Iranian border stretching from Mandali to Basra. Iraqis built guard posts every fifty kilometers, defining an area to patrol between them, and also covering the area with night vision capability. While U.S. forces might not have been expected to prevent low-level smuggling, which often occurs on donkey backs over mountains, its failure to secure the paved roads and crossing points showed simple negligence, compounded by naïve State Department diplomats’ insistence that their Iranian counterparts could be either trusted or had the power to hold Iranian intelligence to diplomatic understandings.
Washington also undercut security by relying too heavily on Iraqi Kurdish forces, a situation spawned by the Turkish government’s initial refusal to participate in the military coalition. There were no American forces present along the Iranian frontier in territory controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan or the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Both U.S. forces and the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga left old military roads and smugglers’ routes unguarded. The trust in the Kurdistan Democratic Party may have been misguided. During the first week in July, 2003, a member of the Free Iraqi Force accompanied an American unit into the mountains of northeastern Iraq, perhaps thirty miles from the Iranian border. There, they came across an unauthorized Kurdistan Democratic Party checkpoint from which they confiscated a cache of Iranian passports and money. An American civil affairs officer, not wanting to antagonize Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masud Barzani, returned the passports without copying them and issued an apology. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan officials privately acknowledge problems with corrupt peshmurga taking money to facilitate Iranian infiltration. Failure to recognize and act upon warning signs of Kurdish collusion with Iran has come at a high cost to Iraqi security. There are signs that both Barzani and Jalal Talabani have passively supported infiltration of Ansar al-Sunna terrorists through the northern three governorates and into Mosul. Prior to the April 2004 uprisings, the Coalition Provisional Authority sought to reintegrate the three northern governorates into a unified Iraqi whole. Both Barzani and Talabani calculated that lack of stability and security in the rest of Iraq translated into greater Kurdish autonomy in the governorates they control.
Was de-Ba‘athification a mistake?
When political and intelligence analysts trace the roots of the insurgency, many blame Bremer’s decisions to disband the Iraqi army and purge from government senior Ba’athists. They argue that these policies made idle hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of whom became natural recruits, if not organizers, for the insurgency. Criticisms of Bremer’s first two orders fall flat. It was the willingness of these critics to forgive, rather than to more fully purge Ba‘athists which has fueled the growth of the insurgency.
Criticisms over the disbandment of the Ba‘athist army are moot. The former Iraqi military disintegrated in the face of overwhelming force. The Shi‘a conscripts returned home. Skilled officers left to start businesses. Those who remained were often those who had committed the gross human rights violations. Had the Free Iraqi Forces been ready, they could have filled the vacuum and prevented the complete collapse of the Iraqi army. Regardless, Bremer continued to pay the majority of former military officers and servicemen after the formal disbandment of the army; they did not find themselves suddenly impoverished.[4] In Mosul, Petraeus adopted a more tolerant policy toward former Ba‘athists. His policies backfired. Rather than reintegrating former Ba‘athists and generals into society, Petraeus’ policies created a safe-haven for former regime elements to regroup and coalesce.
Many State Department officials and intelligence officers likewise argued that Bremer’s pursuit of de-Ba‘athification policy was misguided. Diplomats like Barbara Bodine, who once served in Baghdad and so who had many Ba‘athist contacts, argued that the majority of the two million Ba’ath Party members in Iraq only joined the Ba‘athist ranks so that they could find employment. This argument is dishonest. While there may have been two million party members, Bremer’s de-Ba‘athification order only applied to the top four levels, perhaps a total of 40,000 Iraqis.[5] The Ba‘ath Party was hierarchical, with an almost pyramidal structure. To reach the firqa’ level, Iraqis would have to be complicit in the system’s worst abuses. While some Iraqis may have joined the Ba’ath Party in order to win employment, many Iraqis refused to join on philosophical and moral grounds.
Proponents of re-Ba‘athification—most of whom are not Iraqi—argue that CPA Order Number One deprived Iraq of technocrats and experienced educators by firing the Ba‘athists. This is a myth. Under Saddam Hussein, government technocrats received promotions not on their merit, but rather on their political loyalty to the dictatorial regime. Skilled technocrats who happened to be Shi‘a, Kurdish, or Turkmen were disqualified from most top-level ministry positions. Re-Ba‘athification actually hampered rather than sped reconstruction by excluding those skilled Iraqis discriminated against under Saddam Hussein’s rule. The April 2004 reversal of de-Ba‘athification led to the firings of several thousand non-Ba‘athist school teachers whom the Coalition had hired upon the fall of Saddam’s regime. Complaints that de-Ba‘athification banned top tier Ba‘athists from work were simply inaccurate. High-level Ba‘athists remained free to work in the private sector. But no one is entitled to a government job.
The April 2004 siege of Fallujah and its aftermath demonstrated the efficacy of de-Ba‘athification. Between April 6 and April 30, 2004, U.S. forces formed a tight cordon around Fallujah, sealing off the violent city. Widely condemned at the time by human rights groups, and the Arab and Turkish media, the siege ended with a decision to transfer security responsibility to a new Fallujah Brigade, comprised disproportionately of Ba‘athists and former high-level Iraqi military officers. Islamists in Fallujah interpreted the deal, which even the Iraqi Defense Minister condemned, as a victory over the United States. Militants drove through the streets chanting, "We redeem Islam with our blood," as Minaret-mounted loudspeakers lauded "victory over the Americans." During the 24 days of siege, there were five car bombings throughout all of Iraq. This figure increased six-fold in the three and a half weeks following the end of the siege and transfer of authority to the Fallujah Brigade. Empowering former generals and high-level Ba‘athists led not to security, but to the creation of a safe-haven for the insurgents. The old-guard senior officers empowered in Fallujah proved themselves untrustworthy and dogged in their loyalty to Saddam. Only a systematic purge of Saddam loyalists from positions of power will bring security to Iraq.
The Fallujah agreement was symbolic of a greater strategic problem. When confronted with violence in Iraq, American and British policymakers appease. A typical example of this tendency involves Hawija, a small town southwest of Kirkuk. Since the Iraqi monarchy inaugurated the Hawija irrigation scheme seven decades ago, Sunni Arabs have dominated the district. When Saddam’s government gerrymandered provincial boundaries to dilute the proportion of non-Arabs in oil-rich Kirkuk, they separated Hawija from Tikrit’s administrative control, and reassigned it to Kirkuk. Within weeks of Saddam’s fall, Hawija became a hotbed of anti-Coalition activity. British diplomats re-directed money allocated to aid projects in Kirkuk in order to fund new projects in Hawija. The strategy to which many diplomats still adhere, failed. Hawija remain restive. Meanwhile, disenfranchised Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen in Kirkuk learned the lesson that cooperation has costs, but violence pays. Kirkuk has since grown more violent, and will continue to so long as the Coalition vindicates violence and penalizes peace.
A related strategic failure has been Coalition pursuit of a ‘Sunni strategy.’[6] Many Iraqis interpret any discussion of a Sunni strategy as suggesting that Washington will not live up to its rhetoric of democracy, and will instead return the Sunni minority to what many former Ba’athists--and the Saudi and Jordanian governments--felt was the Sunni community's birthright. Iraqis interpreted Bremer's decision to televise his April 23 speech announcing a rollback of de-Ba‘athification as proof that Washington was pandering to Iraq's Sunni population. The decision to reverse de-Ba‘athification in effect traded the goodwill of Iraq's 14 million Shia, and millions of Kurds and Turkmen, for the sake of, at most, 40,000 high-level Ba’athists. The more American policymakers talk about separate Sunni, Shi‘a, and Kurdish strategies rather than integrated Iraq strategies, the more American policymakers contribute to the further fracturing of Iraqi society.
A last issue that bodes ill for future Iraqi security is the inability or unwillingness to tackle the presence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK]. The continued PKK presence in northern Iraq should be an embarrassment to the United States. Under terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1483, the United States (and Great Britain) assumed legal responsibility as occupying power for the territory of Iraq until the June 28, 2004 transfer of sovereignty. That a terrorist group openly operated with impunity from an area under U.S. responsibility undercuts the moral authority of the White House in waging the Global War on Terrorism. The situation has grown more serious since June 1, 2004, when the PKK ended its ceasefire. Since then, PKK terrorists have staged near daily attacks in Turkey.
Neither Washington nor Baghdad should expect that Ankara will sit idly by while Iraq-based terrorists strike at Turkey, especially after more than a year of empty promises and inaction. If Turkey pursues its right to self-defense with an incursion into northern Iraq, there can be serious regional consequences. Iran will use the Turkish incursion as a precedent with which to strike at Mujahideen al-Khalq bases in eastern Iraq. While the State Department is correct to point out to their Turkish counterparts the dire consequences for Iraq of unilateral incursions, such demarches fall flat if the PKK retains a safe-haven in Qandil and Baradost regions of northern Iraq.
Elections
While defeat—or at least containment—of insurgency is the interim Iraqi government’s foremost security goal, the greatest political challenge on the horizon is the elections. The Transitional Administrative Law mandates national elections by January 31, 2005 to select a 275-member transitional assembly which in turn will write the new Iraqi constitution. How elections occur will have a lasting impact upon the political development of Iraq. On June 7, 2004, Bremer issued CPA Order Number 96 in which he declared, contrary to the wishes of many Iraqis, that Iraq would be a single electoral constituency and that all seats in the National Assembly would be distributed according to a system of proportional representation. Accordingly, Iraqis would not vote for candidates representing a single local district (as in the United States, Great Britain, or Turkey), but rather for party lists representing the nation more generally (as in Israel). Bremer’s order, which was issued only after close consultation with Carina Perelli, director of the United National Electoral Assistance Division, mandated party lists of no less than 12 members, although independents can still run as individuals after certification from the Election Commission. Party lists must rank candidates in order. For each 0.36 percent of the vote a slate receives, one candidate chosen in order from that list will take his or her place in the National Assembly.
The Coalition Provisional Authority and United Nations also took ethnicity into consideration when designing Iraq’s election system. Iraqi Kurds have been in a near constant state of insurrection against the central government since 1961. Saddam Hussein’s government systematically discriminated against Iraq’s Kurdish and Turkmen minorities, especially in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Ba’athist forces systematically evicted tens of thousands of Kurds and Turkmen. Satellite pictures taken between 1997 and 1998 document the destruction of Kirkuk’s historic citadel. Perelli alluded to Kirkuk at a June 4 press conference when she explained her rationale for treating Iraq as a single district. “There are a lot of communities that have been broken and dispersed around Iraq,” she said, “and these communities wanted to be able to accumulate their votes and to vote with like-minded people.”
Such a decision can have real impact on Iraq’s future. Many Iraqi towns and cities are ethnically diverse. Baghdad itself has over a million Kurds, more than any other city in Iraq. Ten percent of Fallujah, best known in the West for its intense Sunni Arab insurgency, are Kurdish. Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, is only half Arab. Perelli’s decision bolsters ethnic parties at the expense of those which span ethnicity or sectarianism. For example, if Kirkuk becomes divided between Masud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan on one-hand, and Arab parties and the Iraqi Turkmen Front on the other, than the ethnic fissures may worsen. The danger of national communal voting is a Lebanonization of Iraqi politics. If, on the other hand, residents of Kirkuk cast ballots for neighborhood candidates running on local issues such as schools, farm subsidies, and employment policy in the adjacent Northern Oil Company fields, than city politics would be fundamentally different. Indeed, in neighboring districts like Sulayman Beg, local officials expressed fear that ethnic parties would upset the delicate balances achieved over decades.
Fair representation does not require communal voting. Turkmen neighborhoods would likely return Turkmen parliamentarians, regardless of party. Shi’a areas would do likewise, whether their candidates was an Islamist, Communist, or liberal. And, even communities hit by ethnic cleansing would not loose out. After all, Sulaymaniyah’s Kurdish population grew as a result of Kirkuk’s loss, and so the Kurds would still have the same number of representatives in parliament.
But, the decision to treat Iraq as a single national electoral district might have impact beyond just communal politics. Whatever decision is made impacts the character of cities in the Shi’a south. Population movements within Iraq have been more complicated than any in neighboring states. Under pre-existing Iraqi law, residents vote in any district in which they have resided for three years. In normal times, such a regulation has little effect. But, when Saddam’s Republican Guard crushed the 1991 Shi’a uprising which followed the success of Operation Desert Storm, it sent a wave of Iraqi villagers from the countryside into southern cities like Najaf and Karbala. Longtime residents of these cities repeatedly complain that if outsiders or new families have a vote that affects the cities, it could change the cities’ traditional characters. Indeed, their complaints illustrate the fallacy of only viewing Iraqi society through an ethnic or sectarian lens. In normal times, urban evolution could be good. But, the Muqtada al-Sadr uprising demonstrated the dangers of populism. His young and uneducated supporters overran the city, seeking to rule through violence and intimidation. They chafed the more educated, more affluent, and more conservative residents of the shrine cities. If elections treat Iraq as a single national district, than Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers will have as much say over Najaf as local residents. Populism is not always healthy.
Populism is a common problem with proportional representation elections. Voters select from national figures not necessarily tied to any particular district. They do not have the opportunity to elect individual candidates. Those figures may pick a moderate face, but their deputies on the party list may neither be so charismatic nor moderate. Whereas in a multiple district election, constituents vote for an individual, most candidates elected under a proportional representation system are unknown and may not have received any direct votes. Working class Iraqis in teahouses in cities like Nasiriya, for example, can name leading politicians, but not their deputies let alone lower party officials.
Under a national proportional representation system, Islamist parties will be the greatest beneficiaries. Da’wa is perhaps Iraq’s oldest Shi‘a political party. It has both radical and more mainstream factions. Many Westerners view interim Vice President Ibrahim Jafaari, the leader of Da’wa, as a moderate, but among his aides are many who take a much less tolerant position with regard to secularism and independent civil society. Indeed, a militant Da’wa faction is suspected in the December 1983 bomb attack against the U.S. embassy in Kuwait. In the upcoming elections, voters may cast ballots for Jaafari, but their votes may actually apply to officials down the Da’wa list whom they neither know nor agree with. Party lists tend to support uncharismatic party hacks and radicals who might not win election if they had to appeal directly to voters.
The danger is magnified when there is only a single district. In March 2004, influential Karbala cleric Sayyid Hadi al-Modaressi illustrated the danger of non-constituent-based elections. “The first article in a democracy is the rule of the majority over the minority,” he told al-Hayah. The smaller a district, the more local interests dominate in elections. If each seat in the National Assembly were determined by its own election, then each election district would represent only 87,000 people or, perhaps 45,000 voters. With larger voting districts, tribal interests are empowered. The Dulaymi tribe, for example, is dominant in the al-Anbar governorate. If each governorate were a district, the Dulaymi leaders would have sway. However, in a single national district, tribal affiliations break down as voters turn toward larger ethnic or sectarian identities.
Such a phenomenon was best demonstrated in Jordan. In 1989, Jordan held its first free parliamentary elections in more than three decades. The Islamic Action Front, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, won 34 of 80 seats. In 1993, King Hussein amended the election law to change voter choice from “multiple seat, multiple vote” to “multiple seat, single vote.” Voters could only select one slate, and could not prioritize their first, second, and third choices. As a result, tribal concerns took precedent over sectarian, and the Islamic Action Front lost half of its seats. In 2001, King Abdullah increased the number of election districts from 21 to 45 in order to further marginalize the Islamists. The result has been moderation among parliamentarians.
External corruption will be a problem regardless of whether Iraqis vote by party slate or in individual districts, but the problem grows with district size. Neighboring countries each have an interest in the outcome of Iraqi elections. Many subsidize their proxies. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has aided the Kurdish parties and Ayad Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord. Allawi also receives funding from Great Britain and Jordan. One of the reasons why the Iraqi Governing Council forbade the Arab Bank of Jordan from establishing itself in Baghdad was fear that the bank would become a channel for illegal political subsidy. The Turkish government underwrites the Iraqi Turkmen Front and has also subsidized Kurdistan Democratic Party peshmerga. The Iranian government subsidizes the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Da’wa, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia, and has at times supported the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Each of Iraq’s neighbors hopes to swing elections in their own favor. Politics is about patronage, and political leaders who can best deliver will get the votes. Delivery takes money. It is easier for foreign governments to subsidize political lists than try to buy elections in 275 districts, all the more so since it is harder to hide foreign subsidies in neighborhoods where the relationship between constituent and candidate is more intimate. Transparency increases as district size shrinks.
One of the key differences in outcome between national and local district voting is in the geographical distribution of representatives. If parliamentarians were sent to the National Assembly from specific local districts, every town, city, and rural district in Iraq would have at least one representative. But, in a party list system, some towns and districts would have multiple representatives while others would have none. This can be dangerous. In traditional Iraqi politics, constituents call on their representative by drinking tea in their home or office reception area. Iraqi politicians are more accessible than their American counterparts. But, if a constituent does not have an outlet for political complaint, then they are more likely to turn to violence. This pattern has been evident throughout the interim period. Polls repeatedly showed the Governing Council to be unpopular among Iraqis, although many Iraqis made exceptions for their own local candidates. Raja al-Khuzai, for example, remained popular among residents of Diwaniya, and Ahmad Chalabi, however maligned, was popular in the Khadimiya section of Baghdad. Residents of Mosul could turn to local tribal leader Ghazi al-Yawar with complaints. But, anyone living in Fallujah or al-Qaim had no one to which to turn. Perhaps it is not surprising that such towns turned more quickly to violence than did others.
Regardless of how elections are conducted, the Coalition can be faulted for its failure to provide perspective. Iraqis interpret exclusive focus on the January 2005 polls as an indication that the elections may be a one-time occurrence. Washington, London, and Ankara should repeatedly discuss not only the 2005 elections, but the 2009 and 2013 elections as well. This will reinforce the idea that, even if some parties are upset at the results, they might run again. Likewise, the victors should not interpret their win as an endless mandate.
The news from Iraq is often grim. With daily reports of death and destruction, it is easy to view Iraq as a hopeless quagmire. But the situation is far more nuanced than outside commentators often portray. Real problems exist, but many of these problems are solvable so long as the Coalition and the Iraqi interim government treat not the symptoms, but the root causes. Iraq’s allies should resist the temptation to pursue policies for short-term political gain at the expense of Iraq’s long-term health. In terms of both security and long-term politics, Washington, London, and Ankara should treat Iraq as a unified challenge, rather than engaging in sometimes conflicting sectarian strategies. They should avoid short-term policies which might lead to long-term complication. No group should be rewarded for violence, nor should any group be engaged as a single ethnic or sectarian unit. This does not preclude a federal solution, though. Given Iraq’s diversity and its violent reaction to centralization, a more sensitive balance between central government and regional power structures might be the only way to restore peace and stability. Iraqis have shown willingness to compromise, and resilience in the wake of war and insurgency. It is ironic that Iraqis are much more optimistic about their future than are many external policy practitioners. Iraq’s road to democracy may not be easy, but it is navigable so long as the Coalition and Turkey both remain steadfast in their support of the Iraqi interim government and those individuals and parties willing to work within the political process.
Notes
1. Dave Moniz. “Ex-Army Boss: Pentagon won’t admit to reality in Iraq.” USA Today. June 2, 2003. www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-06-02-white-usat_x.htm
2. “Iraq promises more suicide bombings.” CNN.com. March 29, 2003. www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/29/sprj.irq.car.bomb/
3. Colonel Michael Linnington. “Border Security and More.” National Review Online. May 13, 2004. www.nationalreview.com/letters/letters200405131356.asp
4. Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number Two. “De-Ba‘athification of Iraqi Society.” May 16, 2003. http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030823_ CPAORD_2_Dissolution_of_Entities_with_Annex_A.pdf
5. Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number One. “De-Ba‘athification of Iraqi Society.” May 16,2003. http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030516_CPAORD_1_De-Ba_athification_of _Iraqi_Society_.pdf
6. Anton LaGuardia. “Blair will press Bush to adopt ‘Sunni Strategy.’” The Daily Telegraph. November 18, 2003. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/11/18/wirq18.xml&sSheet=/news/ 2003/11/18/ixnewstop.html
