Tough Challenges for a New Iraq

In Iraq, the country where the US chose to make its most ambitious foreign intervention since Vietnam, the ballots have been cast, and cast by voters from across the country’s sectarian divides, including a robust turnout by Sunnis. But the challenges are still to unfold — for Iraqis to prove that their elected officials will rule democratically, and for Americans to prove that at last they have an exit strategy.

To President Bush, whose term in office will clearly be defined by how the war in that sad land pans out, the elections represented the best day since the fall of Baghdad 32 months ago, not to mention the best day since he precipitously declared the military campaign there a “mission accomplished.”

“This is a major step forward in achieving our objective,” he declared, “which is having a democratic Iraq, a country able to sustain itself, a country that will be an ally in the war on terror and a country that will set such a powerful example to others in the region, whether they live in Iran or Syria.”

Gen. George W. Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, told a Pentagon town hall meeting via a video teleconference from Baghdad that the United States should now expect the insurgency to “gradually reduce.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that now “Iraq is going to be a great nation again.” And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — this time refraining from asking himself hard questions and then answering them, as is he is wont to do —said he was convinced that the large turnout was decidedly a defeat for those “behind the bombings, beheadings and other kinds of violence.”

Is this really a turning point for Iraq, when we can speak of the emergence of a “fledgling democracy,” the birthing of a new nation defined by laws and institutions, by justice and freedom, by a social contract between ruler and ruled, and by checks and balances? A nation where individuals have the power to shape their destiny, and where intellectual freedom will replace obedience to authority? True, the stakes for the people of Iraq are high, but no less so for Washington, which has ambitions to turn the country into a “beacon of democracy,” and a vehicle for the transformation of the entire Middle East.

This election does not provide the final judgment on the success of the American project in Iraq, nor approach the aim of the “complete victory” that President Bush has alluded to in the five major speeches he has delivered over the past three weeks, including the impassioned one he delivered to the nation on television last Sunday. Major hurdles lie ahead on the path to a truly independent, free and democratic Iraq. About one thing, President Bush is right: Democracies, he claimed repeatedly, using the political formation of America as an example, “are not created overnight.” The United States, however, had an intellectual tradition on which its founding fathers had drawn to shape the political, ideological and cultural building blocks of their new nation.

By all odds, the American insurgency against the British Crown, like other insurgencies of unhappy people all the way from Ireland to India, would not have succeeded were it not for the fact that the American colonists managed to overcome their local jealousies and ethnic differences, their profound fears and clashing identities and found common ground to communicate aspirations and grievances to each other — though scattered as they were over a huge geographic territory — through a language of shared experience. But more importantly was the drafting of the American Constitution in 1787, that imbued the young nation with self-definition, and restrained officials from acting out of line. It safeguarded individual liberties, established a government of laws — not of men — and bound the United States under the concept of federalism, a unifying symbol of a “nation of nations,” composed of people of different national, religious and racial origins.

To be sure, the Constitution was not ratified till the intellectual effusions of the authors of the Federalist papers — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay — began to appear in the press as a collection of eighty-five profoundly astute essays arguing for its necessary adoption.

Iraq, however, needs more than the creative imagination of Federalists to articulate for its population a plan of how to propel the national sensibility beyond familiar ground into unexpected territory, the kind of territory where citizens reach out for imaginative configurations of thought, value and vision. Iraq needs no less than a revamping of the political culture that has defined it over the last century.

The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates has been brutalized by decades of repression where the individual was socialized with fear. Fear not only of authority figures, but fear of innovation, originality and spontaneity as well. That individual had lived in a mutilated, broken-down society in which the coercive power of the state allowed him no freedom of expression, a state blindly opposed to change and relentless in its suppression of human rights. In that kind of environment, distorted social change becomes more aggravated, backwardness more acute and the spiritual exhaustion of the age more complete. This is when corruption, decadence and brutality by the ruling elite, who felt answerable to no one, become rampant.

Iraqis were rendered a people broken in back and spirit. It will take as long for them to scrub the grime of that devastating political tradition off their national soul as it had taken them to acquire it.

In the new Iraq, where torture was to become a banished shadow of the former Baathist regime, Iraqis from the Interior Ministry still torture their fellow Iraqis in underground police cellars; millions of dollars meant for reconstruction still flow into the bank accounts of corrupt government officials; and the reach of political hatred and ethnic strife has lengthened.

To think that a large turnout at the polls, without a large turnaround in the very perceptions of the political culture, will transform Iraq in the near future, seems unrealistic.

President Bush had every right to be buoyed, as everyone else was, by the throngs of Iraqi voters casting their ballots last week. But an Iraq that is a “powerful example to others in the region,” and a beacon of democracy? Not in Bush’s lifetime or mine, believe me.