Iraq: The Dream Comes to Earth

Posted by: Good Samaritan
on April 09, 2005 @ 07:43 AM EST

The Iraqis now have an elected government. One Iraqi celebrates here.

The Iraqi president will be Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who began his career as a student leader and joined a rebellion against the government before he was 30. He has more experience with democracy than other Iraqi leaders, because the Kurds enjoyed de facto self-government in Saddam's time thanks to the Anglo-American no-fly zone.

Iraq's two vice-presidents will be Ghazi al-Yawer and Adel Abdul Mahdi. Both are former exiles: Yawer spent many years in Saudi Arabia, Mahdi in France. Yawer is a Sunni tribal leader who served as president in the transitional government with Allawi. Mahdi intrigues me: he holds a PhD in economics (good) from a French university (hmm) and the BBC describes him as a free-marketeer (good) and an Islamist (hmm). But Mahdi helped to negotiate the write-off of Iraq's debts. That's impressive.

Ibrahim al-Jafaari, the prime minister, with the most powerful office, is Iraq's most popular politician. He is also a former exile, who fled Iraq after a revolt in the 1970s and spent his exile in Iran and in the UK. While he has been known to back Islam as the sole source of legislation, his political views remain somewhat ambiguous.

Two years ago, Baghdad fell to American forces. The Iraqis embraced US soldiers and tore down a statue of Saddam. But the notion that an invader could be a liberator, that democracy could be brought about by force of arms, was still an outrageous interruption of prevailing assumptions and norms. MORE...

Now it is an accomplished fact. Indeed, the formation of the Iraqi government was largely eclipsed in the news by coverage of the pope's death. That the formation of an elected government in Iraq is second-rank news is striking evidence of how far we have come. Two and a half years ago the democratization of any Arab country, and especially of Iraq, would have been stunning. Now we're already used to the idea. It's hard to imagine how forbidding and impregnable Arab dictatorship once seemed, just as it's hard to imagine the wonder with which people would once have responded to the discovery of America, or to the first airplane or skyscraper.

History is a process of dreams coming to earth. Some oddball has a vision of something no one's ever tried before. It takes work and sacrifice to realize the vision. At first, people are disdainful, or shocked; he is mocked, or ostracized. Later he achieves his vision: the dream comes to earth, in two senses. Yes, what he imagined is now real. But, being real, it lacks the mystical glow of a dream, being full of ugly and tiresome details instead. People soon take the achievement for granted, and forget the needs and lacks that made it so desirable before. Iraq is almost a normal country now, that's all. Just a normal country, what's so great about that?

We can resolve one question that tormented so many people over the past couple years. Is it possible to "impose democracy?" Not exactly; but you can create the conditions which favor the emergence of democracy. Imposing democracy is not as paradoxical as it sounds. Democracy requires rules to operate, rules about how the will of the people is to be expressed; and the creation of those rules must precede the expression of the will of the people. To impose a basic constitution and hold elections under it is a task which a foreign power can carry out (albeit with difficulty, as we discovered). Once democratic processes are up and running, the foreigners can step aside. We did it in Germany. We did it in Japan. Now we did it in Afghanistan and Iraq. We could do it in Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Vietnam. It does require some buy-in by the population, however. Not that they have to love us, but there has to be at least reasonably widespread belief in democracy. And there has to be broad consent to be at least temporarily ruled by foreigners. Some nations would be unwilling to accept that humiliation. If the insurgency had been a genuine national resistance, rather than a desperate struggle of terrorists and thugs representing a small minority at most, the triumphant election of January 30th could not have happened. But most Iraqis welcomed a brief episode of foreign rule, however unpleasant, because Saddam was so much worse.

As Iraqi democracy, once a dream, now becomes a detail-ridden reality, so Saddam's dictatorship, once a macabre reality, is now becoming like a dream, or rather a nightmare. The biographies of Iraq's new leaders, who spent decades fighting against or in exile from it, are a reminder of what we left behind. For thirty-five years Saddam ruled Iraq, with our support for much of that time, later on because we decided to leave him in power even though we were clearly able to topple him. The elected Iraqi government that now takes office could have appeared much sooner, had we been willing to play our part. Why did we wait? Why, in the 1990s, did we indulge in "peace and prosperity" while the Iraqis lived through the nightmare of sanctions and Saddam? Have we learned a lesson?

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