Iraq in Light of the January Elections - Online Version
David Beetham, March 2005
In the second in a series of occasional ORG briefing papers from
key international commentators and experts, David Beetham discusses
the invasion of Iraq and the consequences for democracy in light of
the elections of January 2005.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq raise fundamental questions for
domestic, regional and international politics, whose consequences are
likely to remain with us for a generation. Although not all these consequences
are yet clear, the Iraq elections of January 2005 provide a useful opportunity
to take stock, and attempt provisional answers to some of these questions.
This paper will address three of them:
1. Does the inauguration of electoral democracy in Iraq provide a sufficient
justification for the invasion of March 2003?
2. What has the experience of Iraq taught us about the problems of
promoting democracy through military invasion and occupation?
3. What are the likely prospects of the government brought into being
by the recent elections being able to solve any of these problems?
These questions are obviously closely inter-linked, but they can be
treated separately for purposes of analysis.
Q1. Does the inauguration of electoral democracy in Iraq provide
a sufficient justification for the invasion of March 2003?
The governments responsible for the invasion of Iraq have been very
keen that the international community should 'move on' from debating
the pros and cons of the war, to considering how Iraq's fragile democracy
can be supported and strengthened. A preoccupation with the former issue
is backward looking, they argue, while the forward looking agenda is
the only one that now matters.
This argument is mistaken, on a number of counts. First, the validity
or otherwise of the justifications for the war has profound implications
for the future of international law and international relations. Secondly,
the question of how Iraq's fledgling democracy can be supported and
strengthened cannot be divorced from the circumstances of the invasion
and occupation which led to its emergence. Thirdly, the fact of elections
is now being heralded by these same governments as a sufficient justification
for the original invasion. For all these reasons the issue of justification
is still politically very much a live one.
There is of course a powerful argument, made most recently in Philippe
Sands' book, that the invasion was simply illegal under international
law. However, the political arguments used to sway public opinion have
always moved beyond the issue of international legality; and it has
been a consistent contention of Tony Blair in particular that moral
and political considerations can override legal ones. So it is these
broader arguments that will be considered here.
Before reviewing these arguments, it is essential to enter a caveat.
Being glad that the Saddam dictatorship has fallen and that elections
have taken place does not entail endorsing the war that made both possible.
By the same token, being opposed to the war does not entail being hostile
to the democratic revival that is a product of the invasion, or of wishing
it anything but well. Democrats should be supportive of all attempts
by a people to exercise their right to vote and to practise self-government.
But this does not mean endorsing the war, as its proponents would have
us believe. That would imply that the fact of elections has to trump
every other consideration. This is precisely what is at issue.
The fact that democratisation in Iraq has now become the prime political
justification for the war is evidence of how far previous justifications
have worn thin. Yet the democratisation argument cannot be wholly divorced
from these others, as I shall show; so it will be necessary to review
them all briefly:
1. First and most central at the time of the invasion was the threat
to international security from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), both actual and planned, which had to be pre-empted. This justification
has now collapsed under the weight of evidence that Saddam had neither
the weapons nor the capacity nor even any plans to revive it. The massive
failure of Western intelligence involved in this fiasco has undermined
whatever political credibility attached to the idea of 'pre-emptive
defence', though the suspension of disbelief in secret intelligence
continues to be demanded of the public in support of unlimited detention
without trial at home and abroad.
2. The WMD argument was bolstered in the US by the claim that Saddam's
Iraq was a haven for international terrorists in general and members
of al-Qaida in particular. Other than one or two training camps on the
northern borders of Iraq outside Saddam's control, there was never a
shred of evidence for this assertion. Nevertheless, it was made much
play of by the White House, since it enabled the war in Iraq to be presented
as part of the global 'war on terrorism', and as a natural extension
to the war in Afghanistan, which had received much broader international
endorsement. The fact that the US and UK invasion has itself led to
Iraq becoming a magnet for international terrorism may now give a superficial
plausibility to this argument, but it never had any validity at the
time of the invasion. Indeed, it has become a classic example of the
self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. If the first two arguments could, with some stretching, be described
as variants of a self-defence justification for war, in the absence
of explicit UN authorisation, a third appealed to humanitarian considerations.
Invasion would save Iraqi lives and free the people from the personal
insecurities of an arbitrary regime. The prevention of humanitarian
crisis had already been invoked to justify the no-fly zones in Iraq
during the 1990s, and the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
in the Kosovo crisis of 1999. Blair elevated it into a general principle
in a speech in South Africa later that year, when he said: 'The international
community has a responsibility to act. Sometimes, if collective action
cannot be agreed or taken in time [this will be] through countries with
a sense of global responsibility taking on the burden.' The argument
was put more precisely in a speech by the foreign office minister Baroness
Simon: 'Cases have arisen when… a limited use of force was justifiable
in support of purposes laid down by the Security Council but without
the Council's express authorisation when that was the only means to
avert an immediate and overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe.' Such
arguments and precedents helped create a certain mindset in New Labour
which facilitated justification for the Iraq war.
But did the situation in Iraq in 2003 meet the requirement of 'limited
use of force to avert an immediate and overwhelming human catastrophe'?
Hardly. The no-fly zones already in place, whatever their own legality,
were successfully preventing helicopter attacks on the northern Kurds
and the southern Arabs. Such ongoing humanitarian emergency as there
was in the country was contributed to by the UN sanctions regime, in
which the US and UK were themselves largely complicit. And a full-scale
ground invasion hardly counted as 'limited use of force'.
Some defenders of the humanitarian case for intervention have tried
to strengthen the argument by treating the utilitarian calculation of
costs and benefits as if it could be applied retrospectively, by counting
backwards; but this is fallacious reasoning. You cannot say, well, tens
of thousands of people were killed by the war, but those are more than
offset by the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam in the past. In
a utilitarian justification you can only count forwards: by intervening
you will save more lives in the future than you destroy by the war.
Such a justification looks very inadequate, given the scale of devastation
of the past two years, and the creation of a situation in which the
security of life in Iraq is every bit as arbitrary as under Saddam's
regime. Such were always predictable consequences of an invasion, and
were indeed widely predicted.
4. Given the collapse of these original justifications for the war,
the elections of January 2005 are now being used as the main argument
to defend the war as a just one, or at least as justified. Democracy
and freedom, it is said, have no price, and cannot therefore be subject
to any crude utilitarian calculus. Iraq's elections are being presented
as part of the global struggle for democracy on the part of oppressed
peoples and their supporters in the West. Parallels are drawn with the
introduction of democracy in Bosnia Herzegovina, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan
and other countries where the West has intervened militarily. Even political
science is playing its part in this comparison. In the January 2005
edition of the Journal of Democracy, devoted to the theme of 'Building
democracy after conflict', Iraq is treated as an equivalent case of
post-conflict re-construction to those of Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan,
and as presenting common problems.
The parallel is misleading, however. It is not only that in Iraq the
US and UK were the main instigators of the conflict, for which re-construction
is now the remedy. It is that in the other cases introducing democracy
was always a secondary consideration to the main purpose of military
intervention, which was either primarily self-defence and the removal
of a threat to peace and security (Afghanistan), or humanitarian (Bosnia,
Kosovo). Democratisation came afterwards, as it had done after the Second
World War in West Germany and Japan, and after the Indian invasion of
East Pakistan in 1971 and the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda in 1979.
What is novel and unique to Iraq is the idea that democratisation could
serve as the only or prime justification for an unprovoked invasion.
It is understandable that politicians responsible for sending their
country's troops to their deaths should want to convince the public
that they have not died in vain. But it is inconceivable that it could
ever be elevated into a general principle of international conduct,
that the absence of democracy should serve as the justification for
the unilateral invasion of a sovereign country. Who would decide? What
would the threshold for democracy be? And what implications would it
have for international peace and security? Tony Blair may have remarked
to Peter Stothard: 'People ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not
the Burmese lot. Yes, lets get rid of them all. I don't because I can't,
but when you can you should.' But this could hardly serve as a considered
principle of international relations.
There are some supporters of the war on the Left who argue that state
sovereignty is an outmoded idea, and should not be allowed to stand
in the way of universal principles of democracy, political freedom and
the protection of human rights. This is not only a dangerous position,
given the continuing importance of sovereignty to international law
and security. It also ignores the powerful normative significance the
principle of sovereignty has for people, especially former colonial
peoples with their not so distant memories of struggles for independence.
And it overlooks the intrinsic connection between that principle and
the values of democracy and political freedom. Democracy shares with
sovereignty the core idea of popular self-determination, of which one
is the internal, the other the external, expression. Similarly, the
concept of political freedom in its earliest formulation in the ancient
Greek world meant freedom from foreign domination before domestic political
freedoms. The fact that the one does not guarantee the other, as we
all know, does not excuse us ignoring the connection. National sovereignty
is a moral and not just a legal category, and is so because of the value
that people put on it.
In conclusion, the justification for the Iraq war on grounds of democratisation
is only being advanced because the other justifications have proved
untenable. Yet it can only have any validity as a secondary consideration
to other justifications, not as a legitimate principle on its own, whether
of international law or morality.
Q2. What has the experience of Iraq taught about the problems
of promoting democracy through military invasion and occupation?
Although a different question from the first, this is obviously related
to it. On the one hand, the practicability of any such enterprise cannot
be irrelevant to the question of its justification. And, on the other
hand, how convincing any justification is in the eyes of citizens of
the country being invaded is not irrelevant to its practicability. Now
it may be argued that the problems encountered by the occupying forces
in Iraq have been entirely the product of 'mistakes' made in the early
weeks after the fall of Baghdad. These certainly exacerbated the situation,
but there is good evidence that the problems are intrinsic to the enterprise
of democratisation through invasion, which is deeply self-contradictory
in a number of ways. These can be itemised briefly:
1. Invasion brings the destruction or collapse of the existing state
apparatus, which produces a vacuum at three levels simultaneously -
security, administration and politics. Of course that means an end to
oppression, and what we see is an immediate flowering of civil society,
in journals, newspapers, free associations, and so on. But we also see
a flowering of a very uncivil society, because what comes with the destruction
of an oppressive state is not only an end to state oppression, but the
collapse of the state itself in its different modes. To be sure there
has been a process of state reconstruction under way in all these three
modes in Iraq, but that has at the same time been systematically compromised
by the fact of the occupation itself, and the way in which the Iraqi
personnel necessary to the new state apparatus have become identified
with the occupying powers who are training them and for whom they are
seen to be working.
2. Invasion brings a radical shift in the balance of forces between
the different communities making up the country (we should avoid the
use of the word 'ethnic' here because that implies treating them as
fixed entities). Here it is the balance between Shia and Sunni, and
between Kurds and the rest of Iraq. It is a common feature of all the
Western military interventions over the past decade - in Africa, the
former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan - that they have brought with them a
radical shift in the balance of forces between the main local communities,
sometimes intentionally so, sometimes unintentionally; but all bringing
a legacy of resentment on the part of those losing out. Such resentments
make the process of democratisation especially complicated and precarious.
Now I place these two items - state and nation - first, because it
is an accepted tenet of most of the recent literature on the 'transition
to democracy' that the two most essential preconditions for democracy
are a) a state whose writ runs reasonably effectively throughout the
territory and b) a minimal level of agreement on nationhood and on the
relative powers of the regions and communities that make it up. Without
these you may have elections, but not necessarily democracy - witness
Afghanistan, where the writ of the elected president does not run far
beyond Kabul, because the local warlords have stepped into the vacuum
created by the invasion; and where a shift in the political balance
to the disadvantage of the Pashtun has led to the continuance of low
intensity warfare in that region of the country. Iraq is not necessarily
the same, but the processes set in train by the invasion are similar.
3. The third item on the list follows from the first two, and could
be called the legitimacy-security paradox, which is particularly stark
in Iraq. Because the regime created after the invasion has been widely
perceived to lack legitimacy, it has provoked resistance and intensified
insecurity; while the means used to deal with resistance has only further
delegitimated the regime, not to mention bringing international opprobrium
to the occupying forces. Some commentators insist there is no such thing
as an organised Iraqi resistance, only a motley of disaffected groups
concentrated mainly in the Sunni heartland. Yet they clearly have a
lot of tacit domestic support. And where they are concentrated happens
to be in and around the country's capital, not out in the periphery;
and they have a disturbing capacity to hit key targets beyond that heartland.
Whatever term may be used to explain these atrocities - the work of
nihilists, fundamentalists, or whatever - cannot alter the fact that
they are manifestly a product of the invasion itself.
4. The fourth of the ways in which the invasion process comes to undermine
the democratisation it seeks to promote, is that whereby the policy
agenda of the invaders comes to pre-empt and set limits to the scope
of a future democratic government. The most crass example of pre-emption
in Iraq has been the decision to privatise the whole of state-run industry
and services except oil, and to allow foreign companies to take them
over. Not only has this increased unemployment, but it will leave an
enormous legacy of resentment for an elected government. Limitations
on that government, whether of policy or personnel, will be determined
by the US interest in securing a pro-US, pro-Israeli regime, and one
which is not shaped by radical Islamist forces. It was this interest
that led to the US veto on early elections after Saddam's fall, which
in turn further intensified the negative legitimacy-security cycle.
In sum, Iraq seems to provide a textbook case of the contradictions
of attempting to bring democracy to a country by force from outside,
and of the way in which intrinsic features of a unilateral invasion
and military occupation come to frustrate the process of democratisation
it seeks to achieve. Democracy through invasion may not be impossible;
but it appears to be a deeply compromised project.
The question which calls out for an answer therefore is: why do none
of these complexities and contradictions seem to have been anticipated?
After all, the democratisation of Iraq has not served only as a retrospective
justification for the invasion; regime change was always the privately
expressed purpose of the neo-conservative group around Bush, as part
of a grandiose plan to reconfigure the Middle East. The answer has to
be sought in the mindset of this group, and in the process whereby anyone
who was not 'on message' was systematically marginalised or excluded
from the decision making arena. That mindset is characterised by two
elements: an extraordinary belief in large-scale social engineering,
provided it takes place abroad; and a highly simplified view of social
and political processes. Both were evident in the recipes for economic
liberalisation in Russia and elsewhere after 1990; where it was believed
that, if you removed the state from the economy, a fully fledged market
system would emerge regardless of any institutional conditions or supports.
Both are now evident in the project for democratisation in Iraq: if
you remove an oppressive state, democracy will spring up of its own
accord. In other words, the many mistakes the Americans have made in
their handling of the occupation were not accidental or avoidable, as
is often claimed; they were inscribed in the nature of the project and
its authors from the outset.
Q3. What are the prospects of the government brought into being
by the recent elections being able to solve any of these problems?
The new government faces three main interlocking dilemmas, failure
in any one of which could also undermine the solution to the others:
Nationhood
Elections do not solve the question of nationhood; rather they raise
it, and can even militate against its solution. This is because agreement
on nationhood requires consensus between all parties, whereas elections
are typically majoritarian in character, and can be sharply divisive
as between winners and losers in the contest for power. This is especially
so where political parties are constructed along communitarian or confessional
lines, rather than cutting across them; and where the introduction of
electoral democracy radically shifts the balance of power between the
communities that make up the nation.
What are the chances that this dilemma can be overcome? Positive features
are that the government created from the January election will be a
broadly inclusive one, and that the key task of the national assembly
will be the drafting of a constitution which will require consensus
from all the country's communities. In addition the prime minister designate,
Dr. Jaafari, has gone out of his way to placate the sensitivities of
ethnic and religious minorities, and has toned down earlier statements
suggesting a commitment to the introduction of sharia law.
Against these positive features has to be set the boycott of the recent
elections by almost all the Sunni community, and their further marginalisation
from power and privilege which will follow the more intensive de-Baathification
process that is envisaged by Dr. Jaafari. How Shia expectations of capitalising
on their new parliamentary majority can be met without reinforcing Sunni
resentment at their loss of power is unclear. Equally unclear is how
the Kurdish demand for autonomy, if not outright independence, can be
met without fragmenting the Iraqi state, and leading to chronic conflicts
over the distribution of oil revenues. These dilemmas are likely to
find expression in fundamental disagreements about the shape of a new
constitution.
The security-legitimacy paradox
Central to everything else is whether the security-legitimacy paradox
can be resolved. Clearly an elected government will have more legitimacy
than one appointed by the occupying powers. But will it be able to improve
security without eroding this legitimacy by the manner in which it does
so? Here the presence of the occupying forces, and the government's
reliance on them, is as much a part of the security problem as its solution,
given the widespread hostility of the Iraqi population to their continuing
presence. Necessary conditions for the improvement of security would
seem to be the following: a commitment by the occupying forces to a
rapid and total withdrawal of troops, and to their replacement by an
international peace-keeping force under UN auspices paid for by the
coalition governments; and early negotiations by the Iraqi government
with the domestic insurgents, so as to separate them from criminal elements
and foreign Islamists. The US is unlikely to accept the first of these
conditions, and will consequently squander the narrow window of opportunity
it now has to declare its withdrawal under the guise of 'mission accomplished'.
It must also be questioned how many countries would agree to contribute
troops to a UN force. Without this condition, however, it is difficult
to see what negotiations with domestic insurgents would be about, or
what incentive they might have to call off what most see as a struggle
for national liberation and the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty.
The economy
The economy was in poor shape when the invasion took place, but the
huge destruction of infrastructure, the imposition of wholesale privatisation
and the favouring of foreign contractors by the US have led to widespread
destitution in the country. Again it is difficult to see the US agreeing
to the reversal of its economic policies, since for the neo-conservatives
democracy means privatisation plus elections, and, as we can now see,
in that order. Yet improvement of the economy and of basic living conditions
for ordinary Iraqis is crucial to establishing the legitimacy of an
elected government. And without economic improvement, it is difficult
to see how the cycle of corruption established under the interim government
of Allawi can be broken, since corruption is bred in conditions of scarcity.
In conclusion, the question about the future of Iraqi democracy after
the elections comes down to a simple one. It is whether the Iraqis will
be allowed to determine their own affairs under some genuinely international
protection force; or whether the continuation of a façade and
tutelary democracy under US hegemony will simply repeat the cycle of
compromised political legitimacy, widespread insecurity and disrupted
basic services that have characterised the military occupation since
2003.
David Beetham is Professor Emeritus, University of Leeds, and Associate
Director of Democratic Audit.
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oxford Research Group.
