There Is No Crash Course in Democracy (by John Burns)

HILLA, Iraq — Americans have set out to teach Iraqis about democracy, and the way it is going says much about the differing cultures and histories and aspirations of the teachers and the students. It is another matter whether the American effort can succeed: Whether President Bush will be able to make Iraq a torch of democracy capable of lighting a fire among the autocracies and dictatorships of the Arab world, or will end up resembling Woodrow Wilson with his belief that the League of Nations would make the world safe for Jeffersonian values after World War I.

The venue for the "democracy training" classes run by American occupation authorities at Hilla, 80 miles south of Baghdad, could scarcely have been more apt for the transition the Americans hope to achieve before the deadline they have set for handing sovereignty back to an Iraqi provisional government next June. The Iraqis who take power then, according to the accelerated timetable approved by Mr. Bush last month, will lead the country as it adopts a constitution with American-style rights and moves to popular elections for a full-fledged new government by the end of 2005.

Overhanging everything here is the shadow of Saddam Hussein, his tyranny and mass murder. So it was apt that James Mayfield, the 70-year-old emeritus professor of the University of Utah who has led the classes, an expert in local government in the Middle East, should find himself addressing Iraqi tribal leaders and stern-faced Shiite clerics in a crypt-like room at the rear of a huge mosque that Mr. Hussein built to his own glory in the closing passage of his 24-year rule.

For the Americans, the tribal leaders and the clerics are crucial constituencies. Many in this country of 25 million give their first and overriding loyalty to their tribal families, and to the men who control their mosques. It was a fact acknowledged by Mr. Hussein, who accompanied his terror with a policy of buying and compromising tribesmen and clerics alike. The Americans too need their backing if they are to work their way back to anything approaching broad support after the months of erosion following the invasion.

At Hilla, it was a tough sell, presaging the problems in forging anything like a consensus on the government that will emerge from the occupation. Tribal and religious leaders, after all, are among those who stand to lose the most if Iraq adopts the broader civic principles preached by Mr. Mayfield. The men who came to Hilla are, for the most part, schooled in the arts of subterfuge and maneuver that find no place in the democratic handbook. "We are chameleons," one of them boasted, after acknowledging that a year ago he could have been found at the mosque limning the praises of Mr. Hussein and celebrating his re-election as Iraq's president by a claimed 100 percent of the vote.

The man who said that, Sayed Farqad Al-Qiswini, is president of the theological college that took over the mosque after Mr. Hussein's downfall, stripping the marble entranceways of plaques that had reminded the dangerously absent-minded or suicidally irreverent that they were stepping into a place of worship not of God alone, but of Mr. Hussein. A senior cleric, Mr. Qiswini had the merit of candor, at least, when discussing his erstwhile fealty to Mr. Hussein. "If you said anything against Saddam, you might as well have jumped into a boiling sea," he said. "I had no intention of jumping into the sea."

This pliability, essential to survival under Mr. Hussein, is a problem now for the Americans, who are arguing for a politics of principle in a country that has had no legitimacy save the gun for most of its existence, under the British after World War I, under the monarchy that was overthrown in 1958, and under the Baathists who paved Mr. Hussein's path to power. If principle were all, America would have little problem in persuading Iraqis of the merit of the formulas brought by the new rulers, focused on the need for a government that can be held accountable to the people.

Listening to Mr. Qiswini, it was possible at times to think him a stalwart advocate of everything in the Mayfield handbook. After the democracy class adjourned, he led a visitor out to a monument in the mosque's parking lot in memory of the thousands of Iraqis, mostly Shiites, who were buried in the largest mass grave discovered since April, at Mahawel, a few miles up the road. Standing there, it was easy to believe him when he said Iraqis had learned a bitter lesson from the dictatorship, that no man should ever again be allowed to concentrate power like Mr. Hussein.

"Saddam Hussein stripped Iraqis of all morality, of all conscience, and left us like a blank sheet of paper, ready for the writing of a new creed," he said as fellow graduates gathered. "We would rather eat dirt than have somebody like Saddam back in power again. All Iraqis have resolved never to allow the tyranny to be restored. So we will construct a new society that will be a model for all the countries in the Middle East."

But it was striking how he avoided mention of the word democracy, the keystone of everything the American lecturer had said. Mr. Qiswini is a local strongman for Muqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old cleric who issues edicts from a Shiite slum in northeast Baghdad and is the son of an ayatollah assassinated on Mr. Hussein's orders in 1999.

Mr. Sadr has come out defiantly against the American occupation, and has devoted himself to street politics that emphasize the demand for a swift transition to an elected government, which in an Iraq with a 60 percent Shiite majority would mean, with certainty, an end to rule by the Sunni minority that has ruled since 1921. Briefly, in the fall, Mr. Sadr declared his movement to be the rightful government, suggesting that he, at least, is not an ardent student of the subtleties of constitutions and minority rights.

Finding ways to mitigate the effects of handing Iraq over to a Shiite-dominated government that might mistreat the Sunnis or simply dominate them is at the heart of the debate among the Americans and Britons who are working on a schedule for a constitution and elections.

At its core, this involves keeping promises made before the invasion that tyrannical centralism would be replaced by a federal system, with a bill of rights protecting minorities and other features to shape a working political relationship among the rival Sunnis, Shiites and Christians, as between Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians.

Nothing like this has ever been tried in Iraq before, and nothing like it, at least on more than paper, has been seen elsewhere in the Arab world. Still, the Americans are betting that Mr. Hussein's ultimate legacy will be, in effect, that past nightmares will draw Iraqis on a path of entrenched individual and group rights, of a firewall separation between church and state, of independence for the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and above all, of tolerance for minorities. In other words, the core of a civil society as understood in the West.

The vision is not shared by all Americans here. As they struggle to make sense of the volatile moods here, some senior officers have lowered their benchmarks for an American withdrawal. Now, they say, a stable pro-American government capable of defending itself against overthrow by Hussein irredentists would constitute a success. To hear some American officers and many ordinary Iraqis talk, the country's need is for a pro-Western strongman of the kind that govern in many other Arab countries.

Mr. Mayfield, the lecturer at Hilla, had a more ambitious view. In the gaps between power failures and a chorus of imprecations to Allah, he spoke of his epiphanies. He said he had met a 12-year-old boy who asked him, "Will this democracy you speak of give me a job?" In one way or another, that is the view of many Iraqis, impatient of political process but desperate to the point of rebellion for work, for electricity, for schools and hospitals that function as efficiently as they did under Mr. Hussein - and for law and order.

But Mr. Mayfield took an optimistic view: "I realized that a year ago if this young boy had stood and asked a question of that kind of Saddam Hussein, he would have been shot. And when the neighbors of this young boy started to clap, I took it as evidence that the people of Iraq want democracy."

The lecturer, however, ran onto stony ground when he tried to explain the importance of the separation of powers. "That's why a constitution is so important, so that they cannot take your property, they cannot put you in jail, they cannot force you to be tortured, because the courts are controlled by the government," he said. The interpreter, otherwise fluent in English, was stumped by the concept of divided government, and made several false starts in attempts to convey the idea before giving up.

Something closer to a bottom line emerged when they were asked if it wasn't presumptuous to teach basic political principles to the citizens of a land long hailed as the cradle of civilization. Several men said Mr. Mayfield had said nothing new to Iraqis, because it was all written in the Koran anyway. Saddam Hussein, like Iraqi leaders for centuries, they said, was an aberration from Koranic principles, but that didn't mean Islam was at fault, only that it hadn't been properly applied since the Caliphs ruled in Baghdad nearly 1,000 years ago.

To travelers in the Muslim world, this sealed argument, attractive as it is, is unconvincing. The democratic possibilities in the Koran are most intensively studied at Islamic studies centers in Europe and the United States, not in the many Arab states where the propagation of democratic ideas can lead swiftly to prison. If Iraq can prove the exception, against all odds, the American venture here may yet be the landmark its backers have hoped it will be.

Nothing like this has ever been tried in Iraq before, and nothing like it, at least on more than paper, has been seen elsewhere in the Arab world.

A lot of us here are really big-time supporters of the effort to help Iraq be free, tolerant, and prosperous in the future. If it happens, it will be wonderful -- for us and for Iraqis. And it will be earth-shaking in the middle east.

I think it's important for us all to keep in mind that it isn't easy, and success isn't assured. God bless our President and all his supporters for taking the risks to try to make this work.

The author was too tactful.

We may set up a democracy in Iraq.

But when we leave, they'll fight it out on the streets to determine whether a dictator offering Islamic nationalism or a Western-style democracy will dominate.

I'm betting they revert to their barbaric religion and culture at the first opportunity.

These are not Western cultures. Their history of 6,000 years of servile existance under various totalitarian regimes is ample evidence.

They have never offered any honor or dignity or rights to the minority, to the dissenter. Their judicial systems, much like Russia's until recent years, offer no protection to the minority or anything resembling a real system of justice.

Of all the countries in the Middle East, only Turkey and Iran have a real shot at democracy. And neither is Arab. Turkey already has one. Iran could have one in coming years.

You might be right -- I don't know. I guess I'd reply that the Japanese were in a similar situation years ago. It took years (maybe decades) of military occupation, but they finally joined the more or less civilized world. Our efforts in Iraq might be a failure, or they might work. I have cautious optimism. And even if we fail, I think it's a very noble failure -- I won't be upset that we tried such a difficult task. (I've told my chain of command I'm willing to be deployed to Iraq. I'm willing to put my personal safety where my beliefs are.)

I agree with you. The funny thing is that the framers of the U.S. constitution had a dim view of "democracy" and actually repeatedly warned against it. They founded a constitutional republic with a weak central government and strong states, backed up with an explicitly Protestant culture. Completely different than what we see now.

Well put, Dubya. ;^)
Heck, even in America, you gotta want the freedom and liberty, and defend it jealously... otherwise, five liberal Jusitces can just wave it away "for our own good" at any time.

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