The Middle East - Elections and Sorcer's Apprentices

This offering from one of Dr. Guadi's friends, Angelo M. Codevilla takes a look at the Iraqi Elections from a perspective hard to find in the mainstream media. We believe you'll agree that MILNET needs to have a lot more of Mr. Codevilla's writing -- clear, concise, powerful, controversial. We're happy to offer:

Elections and Sorcerers’ Apprentices

By Angelo M. Codevilla

The Iraqi elections of January 30 will be one more episode in the civil war that began with Saddam’s ouster and is likely to end in Iraq’s breakup – or its survival in name only, much as Bosnia survives today. That cannot be helped. But the US government has added fuel to that war’s flames, and is well on its way to making a mockery of the elections.

The reason for this is that the US government’s goals for Iraq contradict each other. On the one hand the makers of our foreign policy want the Iraqi people to choose their future democratically. On the other hand, they want Iraq to be one country, in which all major groups are represented fairly and treat each other equitably. The problem is, that the peoples who live in Iraq have no intention of treating one another equitably, and none expects that the others will treat it equitably. Hence none want a fair distribution of power and all regard democracy as a weapon in the settling of scores. Our wise policy makers are surprised. They should not be. Worst of all, as they have scrambled Iraq’s internal politics, they have forgotten America’s own basic interest in the region.

Iraq was never a nation. It was an empire, ruled first by kings then by dictators. The rulers’ henchmen came from the empire’s smallest major group, the Sunni Arabs from North and West of Baghdad – between 15 and 20% of the population. These Sunnis lorded it over the mostly Southern Shi’ite Arabs, under 60% of the population, and over Northern Kurds, between 20 and 25%. The Shi’ites longed for relief from oppression, and for vengeance. The Kurds longed to be free of Arab rule. The Sunnis regarded their privileges as sacred rights. Hence the Shi’a saw elections as the possible fulfillment of their dreams, the Kurds welcomed them warily, and the Sunnis fought them as their worst nightmare.

The US government dreamed that the three groups would compete peacefully, peacefully accept the results of the elections, and share power peacefully. Nonsense. The Sunnis judged that they were likelier to get a bigger share of power through bullets than through ballots. It is essential to note that the Sunnis have fought the elections not because they are rigged, but precisely because they are not rigged.

One of the reasons why the Sunnis are raising the price of their cooperation is that the US government puts such a high value on the unity of Iraq. For the sake of that value, the Sunni leaders reason, the US government would end up supporting their demands. And it seems that they were correct.

From the time the State Department and the CIA took control of the US occupation in the summer of 2003, the US government has tried to re constitute as much of the old Iraqi regime as possible, both to appease the Sunnis and because the Sunnis are the ones who have run Iraq in the past. To the dismay of Shi’ites and Kurds, the US has filled the Interim government with “former” members of Saddam’s Ba’ath party. Some three quarters of the officers in the Iraqi armed forces served under Saddam, and the majority are Sunnis. So are administrators in a variety of ministries. The US government installed as Prime Minister one Iyad Allawi a longtime CIA agent who argued for years that the Ba’ath party was OK except for a few bad apples at the top.

Allawi’s inclusion of so many Sunni “ex” Ba’athists reminds Iraqi voters too much of the old regime. But his concessions have not been enough to satisfy Sunni leaders. As a result, Allawi’s party is almost universally unpopular, except with the US State Department – and it doesn’t vote.

As it stands, the elections will give political power to many Shi’a, a fair number of Kurds, and very few Sunnis. The logic of democracy would seem to encourage the legitimate winners to deal with the insurgents as forcefully as possible.

But the US government does not want that. It finds fault neither in itself nor in its chosen Iraqis, nor simply in the facts of life. Rather, led by such experts in democracy as the Hoover Institution’s Larry Diamond, it is getting set to try effectively to set aside the election results by adding to the new parliament and the new government a number of un elected Sunnis of its choosing. A “national round table” they call it.

US intelligence agencies, it seems, have recently discovered what has been evident to ordinary mortals for a long time: that the majority of Iraqis, especially the Shi’ites, are unwilling to compromise any further with the Sunni insurgents, and that they view the elections as a warrant for pursuing their civil war with ruthlessness typical of that region but abhorrent to Americans. Moreover, the elected government may well ask the US to stop interfering in the country’s internal affairs.

If the elections were to result in American social engineers butting out of Iraqi affairs America would benefit as much as Iraq. Our interest in that country is that its regime not promote terrorism against us. We secured much of that interest simply by overthrowing Saddam. The rest can be secured only by tearing out the roots of his regime. And that can be done only by the regime’s internal enemies. The January 30 elections are sure to legitimize those opponents. The US government should then stop playing sorcerers’ apprentice and let nature take its bloody course.

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute.