Illusions Of Iraqi Democracy

In its effort to garner domestic and international support for a military campaign to disarm Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein's regime, the Bush administration has promised to bring democracy into the country and strategically transform the whole region. President Bush and his senior aides note that liberating Baghdad would usher in a peaceful, democratic dawn in Iraq that would spill over into other authoritarian Arab states. It is a tall and ambitious order for the Middle East. But as America moves closer to war with Iraq, the policy debates have focused on procedural issues, not on the internal conditions in Iraq that will determine the likelihood of a peaceful, democratic state after Hussein's departure.

Iraq's fragmented society and blood-soaked political history should make anyone wary of predicting the swift creation of a viable democracy there. The U.S. establishment does not seem to appreciate how deeply entrenched are sectarian, tribal and ethnic loyalties and how complex would be the job of reconnecting Iraqi communities, estranged from one another by decades of divisive official policies.

Iraq always has been difficult to manage and govern. Hastily glued together by Britain in the 1920s to serve its imperial interests, it was placed under the Hashemite monarchy, brought from nearby Hijaz (today's Saudi Arabia), which lacked public legitimacy because of its close ties with colonial Britain and its narrow social base of support. The Hashemites were detached from everyday life; state and society remained separate. Reliance on the army for its hold on power meant that it was only a matter of time before "the man on horseback" would overthrow the monarchy and rule Iraq with an iron fist. Ambitious army officers were in a hurry to do away with the old order and to remake Iraq in their own image: hierarchical, rigid and authoritarian.

Abdul Karim Qasim's brutal 1958 coup inaugurated a new militaristic era in Iraq and sowed the seeds of perpetual power struggles and bloodshed. Between 1958 and 1968, army officers turned their guns against one another and terrorized Iraqis into submission. Their rivalry, along nationalist-communist lines, mirrored that of Iraqi society and was resolved mostly by physical elimination and exclusion. The mentality of the mob prevailed and both groups committed atrocities and massacres that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of activists and innocent civilians. Iraq became the most violent and volatile country in the region.

Mohamed Heikal, an astute observer of Arab politics, has asserted: "Iraq has always been a border state between civilizations and a place where empires collided and armies clashed. Violence has become ingrained in the Iraqi character."