News & Politics > Feature

Democracy in Iraq: Reality or Sales Pitch?
By Lorna Tychostup

Having taught at Oxford and Harvard universities, Fawaz Gerges currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies, and is a consultant and regular commentator for ABC News. He has appeared on CNN, CBS, NPR, and the BBC, and has written for such publications as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Oxford International Review, and the Middle East Journal. At this time he is in the Middle East conducting field research on Hezbollah and Arab realtions with the West. He is also the author of America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (1999) and The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955-1967 (1994). LORNA TYCHOSTUP: Where in the Middle East is there a precedent for democracy except Israel?

FAWAZ GERGES: You have some partial experiments. You have, for example, in Lebanon, a limited form of democracy. And in Egypt, you have a kind of controlled form of democratic participation.

LT: They’re more like police-states…

FG: It’s a volatile system…but with, you might say, a controlled participatory system. In Turkey you have a representative system with a strong military presence. Iran is emerging. A democratic movement from the bottom up is emerging in Iran. In fact, Iran holds one of the fascinating examples of how an invisionist form of democracy could emerge.

LT: A fascinating example?

FG: A fascinating example of how an invisionist form of democratic participation could emerge. But the Iran model tells us it has to emerge from within. And this is why, I think, of all the examples, Iran is the most fascinating because it has taken Iran more than 25 years of turmoil to begin the process of evolution to a democracy.

LT: Would the religious entities be involved in this democracy?

FG: No, I think the religious establishment is under attack by this bottom-up movement that includes 70 percent of the youth and reformist forces. And this Iran example shows the importance of what I call invisionist: local attempts at democratizing the closed political and social structures. The Iran case tells us that it’s the internal rather than the external dynamics which are at least producing some partial results so far.

LT: So something that is grassroots, it rises up from a country itself?

FG: Absolutely. And also, it’s not affected by any kind of affiliation or association with foreign intervention and foreign domination. You see, in the Iranian news now, the religious establishment in Iran cannot blame the West and the outside world for the ills or for the horrible ways they have been governing Iran from 1978 after the fall of the Shah. Because there was a revolution. In a sense this is why it is fascinating.

LT: What does this then tell us about the prospect for democracy in Iraq?

FG: It tells me that forcing democracy in Iraq is a long shot. It tells me that democracy cannot blossom overnight in Iraq. It will take time, effort, and energy, and vital investment in institutional building over more than a decade. Let’s remember that Iraq was ruled by successive military dictatorships for the last 45 years. Dissent was forbidden. Civil society was suppressed. And this is why, I think, in the case of Iraq you need to build, or rebuild, the institutions and the building blocks necessary for a functioning polity and society.

LT: OK, the Americans are in Iraq now. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, they did a study of more than 200 US-led military interventions. Only 16 of them were classified as nation-building attempts. The idea was always put forth that the US would install some sort of democracy in these places. Out of the 16, and these are where Americans either promoted or imposed a democracy in these 16 nation building attempts, only four of them turned out to be success stories—Germany, Japan, Grenada, and Panama. Is our purpose to set up a democracy in Iraq?

FG: Well, I think the irony is that the same people are now basically promising to bring democracy into Iraq and transplant Jeffersonian democracy into the heartland of the Arabian Desert, where the people believe that Islam and democracy are incompatible. I’m talking here about the [American] neo-conservatives. One of their basic premises before 9/11 was: don’t invest too much in the question of human rights and the world law and democracy because, after all, these are very risky premises. And if you do that, you might empower anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. You might bring Islamist governments into power.

I believe it’s realpolitik rather than any form of utopianism or liberal democracy that is the most effective means to govern the Middle East. Of course in the Iraq war, they used the question of democracy as a sales pitch…

LT: To the Americans…

FG: To the American public and the world. But I think the democracy rhetoric masks a more ambitious and broader US strategy, not just in Iraq, but in the Middle East and worldwide.

LT: What would that be? What I see is a lot of confusion.

FG: Of course. I think there is a great deal of amateurism and confusion. So far events in Iraq have the beginning that is not reassuring. You have a state of anarchy. You have instability. You have a great deal of social turmoil. We have not been able to provide what I call the necessary conditions for survival. And I think, despite the lofty rhetoric of the neo-conservatives, they have an agenda in Iraq. And the agenda, it seems to me, is to maneuver some pro-Iraqi exile groups into power positions in Iraq and to try to marginalize and exclude those forces who are perceived to be either Islamist in character, pro-Iranian, or anti-Western.

LT: According to what I have read, the CIA was very successful in helping to put Saddam into power.

FG: Well, you know, we have many reports about America’s role in Iraq since the 1950s, and the reports basically say we don’t have any conclusive evidence to show that the CIA helped bring about the army officers who came to power in 1958. I have not seen any declassified materials and I work on US declassified materials, US documents. I have not seen any myself. And the ones I have seen so far are inconclusive. So I tend to basically be skeptical so far. But am I surprised or was I surprised that the United States used Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and 1980s against its archenemy Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran? No.

And the United States and the Western powers did provide Saddam Hussein with technical, logistical, and financial resources, which enabled them to win the war against Iran in 1989. And I think Saddam Hussein believed himself that he was on the US goodwill list because of his attack on Iran. And then somehow he thought that he had a yellow light to move against Kuwait in 1990 after that fateful meeting with the US ambassador. So regardless of whether the documents insist or not that the CIA did help Saddam Hussein come to power, we have evidence to show that the United States did support Saddam Hussein and provide him with considerable intelligence, logistical, and financial resources, which enabled him to weather the Iranian military onslaught and in fact win the war.

LT: You said earlier, realpolitik rather than any form of utopianism or liberal democracy would be the most effective means to govern the Middle East, and that “necessary conditions for survival” need to be provided for. What would the “necessary conditions for survival” be in Iraq?

FG: Well, first of all, you have short-term steps and long-term steps. The short-term steps, you cannot do anything in Iraq unless you have security. You must provide security. And security does not exist in Baghdad today. The city is lawless. The streets are dangerous. The situation is very chaotic. Criminals, gangsters, looters own the streets. So, first and foremost, provide security to bring order and to provide law and order. Secure the place. Let the people feel secure in their homes. And then you provide the services, the necessary services…electricity. There’s no electricity now. I mean, can you imagine the temperatures in Iraq now? No running water? And they are saying even throughout the summer electricity will not be fully restored. Not even by the end of the summer. So these are the short-term steps.

The long-term steps, if there is any major advice to give, is avoid the temptation of trying to impose any particular leadership on Iraq and on Iraqis. It seems to me that even though the rhetoric is very lofty and fine, it is up to Iraqis to choose their leadership; the US authorities are trying [to choose for the Iraqis]. Iraqis inside the country are a bit angry and restless about what the US authorities are trying to do, which is to really empower what I call the Iraqi exiles, who are the darlings of the Pentagon and Defense Department.

LT: Did we really think it would be any different?

FG: Yes. Because the president himself has gone on record saying that Iraq will be in charge of their destiny. And I think the reason why it’s very dangerous to even give the impression that the United States is imposing any kind of leadership is because for any political arrangement to be effective, the process of consultation and representation must be transparent and fair, and must be free of any foreign intervention.

One point that must be made very clear, Lorna, is that Iraqis must be in charge of transforming their society, rebuilding their lives, and rebuilding their representative institutions. What the United States and the international community can do is to provide them with the needed resources: financial resources, political advice, and the space to meet, to consult, and to at least arrive at mechanisms and means to govern their country. So, first and foremost, no external power, not even the greatest power in history, the United States, can bring democracy into Iraq. Only Iraqis can transform their society. And the United States must avoid the temptation of trying to impose any particular leadership on Iraq and Iraqis.

LT: Yes. But according to an article by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald out of Glasgow, Scotland, who has been writing about these issues for a while—he was one of the first people to break the story of the Project for a New American Century; he wrote an article in April called “Carving Up the New Iraq” [reprinted in these pages last month]—Mackay says, “The term ‘military industrial complex’ brings to mind crazy conspiracy theories, but let’s consider the term again. Each and every one of the companies in the running or in possession of contracts to reconstruct Iraq are either major Republican donors or have government staff working for them. The donations to the Republican Party—and also to George W. Bush himself—run into the millions.” And then he goes on to say, “While Iraq may be free of Saddam, it looks like it’s going to be the most lucrative country on Earth for the foreseeable future—at least for US hawks anyway."

Was this ever about installing democracy?

FG: We’re all speculating in the sense that we are saying we think that it’s a sales pitch. I think, first and foremost, it was about something else. The rhetoric about democracy was used by the administration as a means to convince the American public and world public opinion that the United States is trying to bring democracy into Iraq. And I think it’s not the main reason. LT: But it was never about democracy in the first place, if we go back to the beginning. We had an attack in the US. This was about a war on terror. We were to find the perpetrators of this crime and they would be punished. And then the US would make sure this would never happen again. So part of the sales pitch was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction aimed at the US and we had to go there—Saddam wasn’t even on the top 10 list of terrorists—for security purposes. So the sales pitch began with protection from terrorism and now we are talking about setting up a democracy.

FG: I really hope you write about that yourself because that is the big question. It seems to me that we went to Iraq in order to disarm Iraq from its unconventional weapons, which represented a “great threat” to American security. And not only have we not found any major stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but such weapons were not even used [during this war] in the first place, if there were any weapons. And this throws many question marks on the table and it raises big questions about the purposes of the US invasion.

I think it’s the strategy of the neo-conservatives in the administration; I think the American public and the international community were not told, were not fully informed about the real motives and the real causes and the real foreign policy designs of the invasion. And I think these, what I call untold goals and ideas, will come one day to haunt these neo-conservatives because they will come to realize how difficult it is to bring democracy into the world, how difficult it is to force democracy. Unless of course they really turn around and invest considerable resources in trying to help Iraqis.

Let’s put it this way: the US has the ability to help Iraqis rebuild their lives and rebuild their representative institutions, regardless of whether democracy was on the agenda of the neo-conservatives or not. I think if the political will exists on the part of the US policy establishment, I think Iraq could be transformed. I think Iraqis could transform their country. But, and this is what you need to understand, this is all dependent, will be dependent on how serious American policy-makers are in trying to help Iraqis themselves transform the country. On whether they will be willing to stay in Iraq, politically and economically engaged for the next 10 years. And on whether they’re willing to provide the tens of billions of dollars. NEXT MONTH: Part Two of Lorna Tychostup’s interview with Fawaz Gerges.