What The Hell Just Happened In Iraq? Ctd

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04 Feb 2009 04:32 pm

A marine writes:

I have no inside information on the latest election, but I was on the ground for the 2005 rounds of elections in Fallujah, and can shed some light and historical perspective on what happened. As your sources noted, the Sunnis of Anbar province boycotted the first round of elections in January, 2005. Out of a city with an approximate population of 180,000, Fallujah saw 8,000 turn out to vote. What was never revealed, maybe until now, is that those numbers were significantly padded by the 4,300 Iraqi Army soldiers stationed in Fallujah. And these soldiers were nearly all Shi'a from Baghdad or Basra. So, in the end, less than 4,000 Fallujans actually voted in that first election.

The job of that first assembly, as you may recall, was to draft a constitution, like our Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Sunnis of Al Anbar, and especially Fallujah, realized quickly that their boycott had only resulted in ceding all the power to the Shi'a and the Kurds. So they decided to participate in the next round of elections. First came the constitutional referendum, which saw more than 100,000 Fallujans vote (nearly unanimously against it) in October of 2005. Then, in December, even more Fallujans, 130,000+ by the Iraqi Election Commission's reckoning, voted in the Iraqi National Assembly elections.

Setting the conditions to allow this election was the major objective of my unit at the time, and we all did everything we could to encourage the large turnout. But it seemed to me then, and still does, that this early emphasis on elections was certain to backfire. Our political leaders were selling elections as if they were a magical cure for all the problems of Iraq, that, simply by voting, Iraq would become like all the other democracies in the world. And this clearly was not the case.

Elections in the absence of stability might have even made things worse, offering false hope to the soon-to-be disillusioned Sunnis of Al Anbar. The riots and uptick in violence in Anbar province that occurred when the election results were announced (in early 2006) would seem to confirm this view.

Before the election I talked with a lot of Fallujans about what the election would mean to them and what they expected from it. To a man they were convinced that Sunnis were the majority population in Iraq and once they all voted, Sunnis would take their rightful place at the head of government. It was impossible to counter this idea. If I suggested that generally accepted figures by the U.N. placed Sunni Arabs at about 20% of all Iraqis they would dismiss it out of hand. Who gave you those figures? The Shi'a? Iran? I remember the old men saying, "How can this be? Look around you, everyone here is Sunni. Everyone I know is Sunni. You Americans are so naïve to believe everything the Shi'a tell you."

During these conversations, I recalled our training on Iraqi culture prior to our deployment. A professor from Georgetown University had warned us (mostly college educated officers) how different it would be to interact with illiterate people. Most people in Al Anbar could not read, she said, and therefore they had only their limited personal experience, and the words of their elders, to provide context to their reality. For a literate person, it is virtually impossible to comprehend how an illiterate person processes information. How true this observation turned out to be. The idea that our civilian leadership thought liberal democracy would spring up naturally in this environment still seems incomprehensibly foolish to me.

I think the folly of introducing "democracy" with the hasty election scheme was disastrous and foreseeable. Any serious student of geopolitics knows that the rule of law is the fundamental precursor to a functioning democracy - institutions, culture, accepted norms... need to be shaped and accepted thoroughly over generations. Our own democracy did not drop out of the sky in 1776, it was a product of centuries of British history. As the already sixty year rise of South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc. reveal, the transition from rule of law to democracy occurs in different ways in different cultures, and typically takes several decades, not months.

As the recent election reveals, Iraq might very well be on that path of transition at last, but I hope our leaders finally understand that it will happen in Iraqi fashion, and will likely be a decades-long process. So hopefully we will ask ourselves whether we want to take the ride with them, or if we have found a good spot to get off.