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Iraq: the failures of democratization.

Article Excerpt
The failures of Iraqi democratization as advocated by the Bush administration should not be blamed primarily on the Iraqis. Nor should they be used to reinforce racist notions that Arabs or Muslims are somehow incapable of building democratic institutions and living in a democratic society. Rather, democracy from the outset has been more of a self-serving rationalization for American strategic and economic interests in the region than a genuine concern for the right of the Iraq people to democratic self-governance.

Many Iraqis might have dreamed about democracy. What they got instead was occupation.

The U.S. government, despite much rhetoric about democracy, imposed its own political structures on Iraq, agreed to more representative procedures and institutions only when pushed to do so by the Iraqi people, presided over the breakdown of civil order, and violated the human rights of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens. In short, Washington acted as an occupation force. By associating its actions with democracy promotion, it ended up giving democracy a bad name.

Never About Democracy

Once the arguments about "weapons of mass destruction" and links to al-Qaida were exposed as fictions, bringing democracy to Iraq became a major rationale for the U.S. invasion. Yet the Bush administration, during most of the first year of the U.S. occupation, strongly opposed holding direct elections. Soon after occupying the country, the United States appointed an "Iraqi Governing Council" (IGC) as a consultative body. Initially, Washington supported the installation of Ahmed Chalabi or some other compliant pro-American exile as leader of Iraq. When that plan proved unacceptable, U.S. officials tried to keep their viceroy Paul Bremer in power indefinitely. When it became clear that Iraqis and the international community would not tolerate that option either, the Bush administration pushed for a caucus system in which American appointees would choose the new government and write the constitution. Only in January 2004, when that plan prompted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to take to the streets to protest the proposed caucus system and demand a popular vote, did President Bush give in and reluctantly agree to allow direct elections to move forward.

Instead of going ahead with the poll in May as called for by Ayatollah All al-Sistani and other Iraqi leaders, however, U.S. officials postponed the elections until January 2005. They argued that there was inadequate time to register voters and that the ration lists developed during the UN-supervised Oil for Food program were inadequate (though the voter rolls for the election were based in large part on the ration lists anyway.) In the meantime, however, the dramatic growth of the insurgency during the eight-month delay resulted in a serious deterioration of the security situation. By the time the elections finally took place, the large and important Sunni Arab minority was largely unable or unwilling to participate....

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