Possibilities for Democracy in Iraq

My wife and I are traveling this week, and we spent much of yesterday talking with old friends in North Carolina. Along with Representative Brooks's caning of Senator Sumner, gardening, and birds, we spoke of the American adventure in Iraq. I asserted that the goal of democracy in Iraq was wrong-headed, because a democracy is based upon the ability of a political minority to become a majority, thus causing the government to change hands. When the parties are all based on ethnicity, language, tribe, or religion, the voters cannot shift freely from one to another, and so the minority parties have no realistic chance of ever becoming a majority. At that point, there is no longer much incentive for them to play the democratic game, and they might as well turn to violent insurgency, subverting the military, and other games of violence and intrigue.

This topic relates, by the way, to my post earlier this month on the purpose of political parties. A political party with minority support should, as a matter of principle, as well as of practical necessity, make every effort to obtain the support of a majority of voters. A party which is more interested in expressing some principle, or sending some message, than in winning a majority, is no longer a real political party.

The bare statement that democracy is impossible in Iraq, because the parties are not based upon voters' opinions of policy position, is, I now think, inadequate. We might better ask: Under what conditions could democracy become possible in Iraq?

The key here is a principle of games theory, one used (perhaps to excess) by President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress of his day. It is pointless, and costly, to seek more than a bare majority of support. If 50% + 1 vote is all the support one needs to carry a position, then spending more effort, money, or other resources to attract more votes is wasteful. In practice, this means that parties which have achieved super-majorities - the Democratic Party under Jackson after 1828, the Democratic Party under Roosevelt after 1932, the Democratic Party under Johnson after 1964 - break up. That is, a majority having been attained, the party no long finds it necessary to spend its capital to continue to attract some portion of its coalition which is now surplus to needs. One way to look at the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, is to note that the Democrats, holding a good majority in Congress without the support of the Deep South, were no long willing to offer the Southerners what they would have demanded to remain with the Democratic party: Therefore, the Southerners became eligible to join the Republican coalition.

Similarly, one can look at the Shi'ite majority of the population, and note that there are divisions among them. At some point, some portion of the Shi'ite coalition won't get what they want, and they may, then, make common cause with some Sunnis and some Kurds to form a new coalition. The critical point, in my opinion, is that the issue around which the new coalition forms, or around which the Shi'ite majority splits, must be a non-religious issue - division of oil money among the provinces, tax policy, farm subsidies, or location of new industrial development, for example. In other words, the hope for democracy in Iraq depends upon the increasing salience of non-religious, non-ethnic issues in the country's politics.

Gauging Success of Failure in Iraq

To decide whether something was successful or not, one needs to understand the objectives it was supposed to accomplish. A continuing problem in historical analysis is that objectives are often multiple, vague, or equivocal, while apologists sometimes seek to modify the objectives after the fact. For example, the United States lost the War of 1812, and lost it decisively, in terms of the original objectives of the War Hawks, such as Henry Clay, who wanted to annex Canada. One of the results of the Treaty of Ghent was the end of impressment of sailors from American ships. So, after the war, publicists spread the notion that our objective had been to end impressment, and we had. Ipso facto, we won the war! In fact, the British had agreed to terminate the Orders in Council authorizing impressment before they received word of the American declaration of war.

That sort of equivocation has consequences. Because American history texts tended to go along with the notion that we had won the War of 1812, the Richard Nixon’s assertion that he refused to be the first U.S. President to lose a war had some credibility. In fact, Jemmie Madison was the first U.S. President to lose a war (and, one might argue, Jefferson Davis was the second), so Mr. Nixon’s point wasn’t as valid as he liked to think. Valid or not, it did help to prolong the Vietnam war. In one of the great cases of such equivocation, assertions by right-wing German politicians that the German army had won World War I, and that victory had been given away by left-wing (Jewish) politicians, led to the rise of Hitler.

In the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Steve Simon’s article “The Price of the Surge: How U.S. Strategy Is Hastening Iraq’s Demise,” is ostensibly a straightforward critique of the infusion of additional U.S. soldiers into Iraq in 2007-2008. In reality, Mr. Simon is establishing a basis for blaming the “loss” of the war in Iraq on the surge. Because of the way the surge has developed, Simon asserts, its successes are largely due to the “bottom-up” developments of better relations between Sunni tribes and the U.S. forces, the withdrawal of Shiite militias from active combat, and the reduction of friction between groups through “ethnic cleansing.” All of these are, according to Simon, threats to the development of a strong, unitary Iraqi state. As he says, “A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctably weaken the prospects for Iraq’s cohesion over the long run.”

Simon assumes throughout that weakening the central Iraqi state is bad, and that the model that should be followed is that of subordinating the tribe and sects to the state. He asserts, and I’m sure he is correct, that there will be some negative effects of encouraging these centrifugal forces. On the other hand, Simon at no point adduces any evidence that a strong, centralized Iraq is, in fact, the goal of U.S. policymakers or military commanders. It may be true, for example, that strengthening the tribes against the state will weaken the center. But lessening the burden of the center on the tribes may make life tolerable for those tribes, so that they will remain in a (weakly) united Iraq. They might not so readily submit to a strong center dominated by Shiites. Similarly, restoring strong central authority over the three Kurdish provinces is likely to exacerbate, rather than relieve, stresses between the ethnic groups. In brief, a weakly centralized Iraq may be more stable in the long run than an attempt to impose a strong central government on a disunited populace.

The surge appears to have succeeded, not only in “reduc[ing] casualties in the short term,” but in demonstrating that a decentralized approach to Iraqi governance is more workable than attempting to clothe an emperor in Baghdad. I could point to parallels with the American experience before the Civil War, when the slave states were willing, if not content, to remain in a weak Union, but felt themselves force to secede at the prospect of a stronger central government. Moreover, whenever I hear someone lament that Iraq will be weak and disunited, I think to myself that the last time we had a strong central government in Baghdad, it attacked its neighbors in Iran and Kuwait. Would a failure to achieve a powerful Iraqi government really be a sign that we had lost the war?

Commentaries on Foreign Affairs: "Iraq's Civil War"

Let me start by quoting the third paragraph, which seems to me to be the real lead, of James D. Fearon's article, "Iraq's Civil War," in the March/April 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs.

"In fact, there is a civil war in progress in Iraq, one comparate in important respects to other civil wars that have occurred in postcolonial states with weak political institutions. Those cases suggest that the Bush administration's political objective in Iraq - creating a stable, peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops - is unrealistic. Given this unrealistic political objective, military strategy of any sort is doomed to fail almost regardless of whether the administration goes with the "surge" option, as President George W. Bush as proposed, or shifts toward a pure training mission, as advised by the Iraq Study Group." (Pages 2-3)

Mr. Fearon, a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, goes into considerable detail in this article about the nature of recent civil wars, the likelihood of a military coup, and the failure of power-sharing arrangements. One interesting statement is this: "To avail itself of more attractive policy options, the Bush administration (or its successor) must break off its unconditional military support for the Shiite-dominated government that it helped bring to power in Baghdad." (Page 13) In line with this argument, he concludes:

"The more likely scenario is that the Bush administration's commitment to the 'success' of the Maliki government will make the United States passively complicit in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. Standing back to adopt a more evenhanded policy in the civil war already in progress is a more sensible and defensible course. To pursue it, the Bush administration or its successor would first have to give up on the idea that a few more U.S. brigates or a change in U.S. tactics will make for an Iraq that can, in President Bush's words, 'govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself' once U.S. troops are gone." (Page 15)

Readers will note that a number of events have occurred since the publication of Mr. Fearon's article. First, the "surge" has taken place, and is continuing. At some point the numbers of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq will begin coming down, but that point is not yet. Second, whether the U.S. has become more "evenhanded" on the political level in Baghdad, U.S. forces have undertaken to cooperate with a number of Sunni tribal leaders on the local level. Third, I think it is becoming evident that there is a contradiction between our all-out support for a Shiite government and our hostility to Iran. And, finally, the Democrats in Congress have failed to force the Bush administration to make any major change in its "strategy" in Iraq. (I would prefer the word "tactics" because, as far as I can tell, the Bush administration has no strategy at all.) Moreover, the leading Democratic candidate, while committed to "ending the war," has no intention of pulling the U.S. out of Iraq in one fell swoop on January 21, 2009.

Now, given my criticisms of Mr. Bret Stephens and Mr. Arthur Herman for their positive fews of the military (and, to a degree, political) situation in Iraq, it may surprise my readers to discover that I think Mr. Fearon's argument has very little going for it. In fact, I think that his conclusion is entirely incorrect.

Indeed, as I stated in another place, the Iraqis have acquired the trappings of a democratic government, without an understanding of the need to share power, to tolerate differences, and to protect the rights of minorities while exercising the will of the majority. However, Mr. Fearon's argument is self-contradictory. On the one hand, he says that powersharing arrangements, however well-intentioned, have seldom worked in modern civil wars. (I might say that I find this obvious: If a group has geared itself up to the point of going to war, it is unlikely to consider its objectives so unimportant, or its enmities so trivial, that it can sacrifice both friends and principles in a trice.) Consistent with this, he says that U.S. efforts to encourage powersharing have been failures. Obviously then, he would support the U.S. backing one side or the other, and not trying to make them kiss and make up.

On the contrary, he then attacks the U.S. for the probability that support of the Shiite regime will involve us in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. And he then advocates that we "step back" from the Maliki government and "adopt a more evenhanded policy."

Here's the way I see it. The reasons that we have a civil war in Iraq are many and complex but, at bottom, the reasons that the minority Sunnis are willing to risk all in openly fighting the government are two-fold: 1) they believe that they will be badly treated by the Shiites and, 2) they also believe that they, with superior military traditions, can at least hold their own against the government. The only way to disabuse them of this fantasy is to back the Shiites to ensure that they achieve a decisive victory over the Sunnis, as soon as possible, so that the Sunnis will realize the necessity of entering into the political process. Weakening the Maliki government, opposing the Shiites, and arming the Sunnis, will merely prolong the violence and postpone the day of reckoning. Moreover, the longer it takes for the Shiite government to subdue the Sunnis, the more a thirst for vengeance is likely to lead to ethnic cleansing.

In this case, Mr. Fearon has it just backwards.

I would encourage you all, by the way, to read Mr. Fearon's article. I find it interesting that a man who is obviously intelligent and well-informed could be both illogical and wrongheaded on a matter to which he has devoted quite a bit of thought.