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April 11, 2003
Ramifications
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
Porphyrogenitus writes about rebuilding Iraq and how soon we should be holding elections. He is unconvinced by Aleksander Dardeli's argument in the Financial Times that we should first build institutions of law and order, then move towards elections. I also wrote about this earlier.
Here is the crux of Dardeli's argument:
Iraq represents an opportunity for a better approach. The initial emphasis should be on humanitarian assistance, economic reconstruction and building the rule of law. No matter how much the enthusiasts cringe at the idea, the US should delay elections until conditions improve and there is a better chance of a government operating fairly and effectively. Justifying early elections by saying that the Iraqis are a proud people, or that Iraq is not Kosovo, is silly. Iraq's institutions have been steadily battered by Saddam Hussein's regime into a state of dysfunction that will take time to mend.
I feel that we would do well to listen to Dardeli. While the immediate judgement of the international community would be that immediate elections (and pretty much only that) would produce a legitimate government, they also felt that way about Kosovo. Further, international opinion was that Saddam's government should not be removed. I'm more interested in three other judgements: the judgement of the Iraqi people, the judgement of the American people and the judgement of history.
There will doubtless be some in Iraq who will want immediate elections. Let me make a quick prediction: these will mostly be people who want to use quick elections to gain power that they would not have otherwise over institutions that will enrich them over the longer term. This has been the pattern in most places where democracy sprouted too rapidly (see Russia for instance). Legitimacy arises from the consent of the governed, but elections alone do not signify the consent of the governed. Note that Iraq and Cuba both had elections in the past year. They were meaningless because the institutions of freedom which make elections meaningful do not currently exist in either Cuba or Iraq.
For the American people, what is going to matter is not what we do now, but whether the Iraqi people are free in four or five years, or at least well on their way. If we betray the Iraqis into despotism - or even an elected shambles - the Republicans will be out on their ears for allowing it to happen, and rightly so. This issue will be minor in the run-up to the next election, unless we really fail miserably and quickly, but will be very important in the next two elections after that. We must keep our word to the Iraqi people to create a free self-governing society, and we will not be able to do that if they have self-government with no free society to govern.
The judgement of history will not rest on where Iraq is in six months, but in six decades. Note that the successes in Japan and Germany were not truly apparent until the 1960s at the earliest, and really it was only in the late 1980s that Germany showed how far it had come by reabsorbing the East without collapsing. The right-wing nationalists were there, waiting, but their opportunity never came. Look, for further example, at South Korea and Taiwan, both of which were not truly free until the 1980s, though they had elections for quite some time before that.
I believe that we will be seeing regional and local elections within a few months, for positions of limited authority over a limited region. But it will be a year at least before the basic institutions of law and order, protection of property, a free economy and a free press have really begun to be effective. It will be longer still - perhaps three or four years - before these institutions will have really taken hold in a way that makes them hard to reverse. Somewhere between that one year and those three or four years would be the right time to begin having national elections for a representative body, and once that body has taken hold, they can arrange for the election of an executive. This amount of time also gives time for what Iraq really needs: a consitutional convention to decide, based on the experiences of themselves and others whom they wish to emulate, how they want to govern themselves.
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