The situation in Iraq is confusing. This should not surprise anyone. When you get involved with trying to tell other people how they should live their lives ― worse, trying to force other people to live their lives as you think they should ― the situation always gets confusing.
Like President Bush, I was opposed to the idea of going into Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein in the pious hope that he would be replaced by a pro-Western democracy. (Oh, sorry ― I didn't mean this President Bush, but the last one, the father, who seems, in retrospect, to have displayed, in this one situation at least, a modicum of good sense.) I didn't believe in Weapons of Mass Destruction ― the last time Saddam had used any of those (World War I-vintage poison gas) was in the 1980s and, for the most part, under the aegis of the government of the United States; and he most particularly had not used them in the Gulf War. I did believe that Saddam Hussein was not the most estimable of characters (“unhanged brigand” was the expression I liked to use to describe the man). Had the Iraqi people stormed his Presidential Palaces, hanged him from a roofbeam, and toppled his statue in Baghdad, I would have been among the first to cheer.
But that was the business of the Iraqi people, not ours. It was their decision (or lack thereof), not ours.
Popular belief to the contrary, there's no evidence that people with no tradition of democracy can't accept it and adapt to it like a fish to water. The problem is that, in Iraq as elsewhere, the United States is not interested in instituting democracy; it's interested in instituting a government that will unhesitatingly do what we want it to do, and force its people to behave in ways we think they should behave.
I have some sympathy for this viewpoint. Although Sistani's view of Iraqi democracy is probably a more correct one than that of Paul Bremmer ― nice, fair general elections in which the majority of Iraqis decide what rules will govern the entire country ― there's no question in my mind that large parts of the Iraqi population (Kurds, Sunnis, women) would suffer more under such democratic rule than they would under a set of relatively benevolent American-imposed regulations ― in some ways, more than they did under Saddam Hussein's rule.
When I see such a situation as we have in Iraq today, I can't help thinking of a scene in L. Sprague DeCamp's science-fiction novel Lest Darkness Fall, written in the days immediately prior to World War II. Protagonist Martin Padway, an archaeologist thrown back through time to sixth-century Rome, is in a bar where he is having a discussion with an “Orthodox” (Catholic) Christian, who is bemoaning religious oppression under the heavy hands of the Goths who now rule in Italy. “But I thought the Goths allowed everyone to worship as they please,” says Padway. “That's the trouble,” sighs the Catholic. “We're forced to stand around and allow all these Arians and Nestorians and what-have-yous to worship as they please instead of following the One True Way. And if that isn't religious oppression, I don't know what is!” In a “democratic”, in the traditional sense of the word, Iraq, the shi'a majority would no longer be forced by foreign oppressors to allow their non-shi'a fellow countrymen to behave wrongly.
The sad fact is, as President Bush père saw in 1991, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq, for all its flaws ― and to call them “flaws” is like calling the sea “damp” ― for all its flaws, it worked. It was arguably, and perhaps only from a religious viewpoint, the most moderate regime (including Israel) in the Middle East. From the international point of view, it suffered primarily from its leader's desire to grab off bits and pieces of other states, a desire that he was never competent to satisfy (even with the aid of the Americans, who were more than desirous of seeing him take part of Iran under his no doubt benevolent protection, and gave him enough aid to keep that vicious and brutal war going for almost a decade). Saddam Hussein's Iraq, thanks to us, no longer exists. And our pious hope that we can put something better in its place, despite the national ambitions of the Kurds in the north, the revanchist aims of the Sunnis in the middle, and the religious goals of the majority Shi'a in the south, remains just that ― a pious hope.
Posted by Don Harlow at April 11, 2004 10:00 AM