Did the US aim to make Iraq a democracy?
The following is an email to Helen Boaden, director of BBC News, and "Newsnight" diplomatic editor Mark Urban. It discusses Urban's saying on "Newsnight" that the US invasion was in part about spreading democracy in the Middle East, for which Urban has drawn criticism from some in the anti-war movement. The point I wanted to make below was that, yes, Washington planners probably did, in their own minds, take the view that they were "democratising" Iraq, but the reality of US policies meant that in practise they were doing the opposite. Bottom line: the Iraqis were being made subjects to a new master, not being liberated to act as free agents.
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Dear Helen and Mark
I've followed with interest your recent correspondence with viewers regarding the question of whether or not the US aimed to export democracy to Iraq. In my view its a shame that the debate has been reduced to a question of either/or since that tends to obscure the important issues at stake here. I think the real point is that one needs to acknowledge the problematic nature of the US claims, and some of the nuances involved, rather than saying the claims were either utterly true or utterly false.
You're right to acknowledge that the US planned to leave in place an Iraqi government that was legitimised by some form of electoral system. But the bottom line was that this government should be friendly to US strategic interests. The US therefore set about engineering a "democracy" that would lead to this outcome. Of course you don't need me to point out that there's a dissonance between this and the idea of democracy that you and I have; i.e. where the population governs its affairs according to its own wishes, without the manipulations of a foreign power.
Mark in particular will be aware that, shortly after the 2003 invasion, forms of local government, often democratic, began springing up all over Iraq, and that these were systematically stamped out by the CPA, which was alarmed to see Iraqi self-rule evolving under indigenous control in a way that might not suit US interests. Michael Knights and Ed Williams touched on this briefly in their report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy entitled "The Calm Before The Storm"[pdf].(see pg 12).
Many gains for genuine democracy and popular sovereignty were actually prised from Washington's hands by the Iraqis themselves. For example, it was Sistani - backed by huge demonstrations in January 2004 - who insisted that any permanent Iraqi constitution should be written by people elected to do so, and that all future Iraqi governments should be elected on the basis of one-person one-vote. The US had been planning all sorts of stage-managed wheezes - like caucuses hand-picked by the CPA - to ensure that the process of "democracy-building" could be as US-managed as possible. Bush was apparently furious about having to give in to Sistani's demands, but faced with popular anger in Iraq he was left with no choice.
Consider also that under US plans, Iraq's principle source of revenue would be tied up in production-sharing agreements with Western oil firms, and that its army would be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US military, which would retain massive permanent bases around the country. Then there's the fact that the US is building the largest embassy in the world - nearly as big as Vatican City - in the heart of Baghdad. You have to ask whether Iraq can be truly sovereign under these circumstances, how much less sovereign it would have been if Washington had kept its grip on the political process, and whether a country that - at the behest of a foreign power - is only allowed the formal trappings of sovereignty can be called "democratic" in any meaningful sense of the term.
I have no doubt that Washington planners sincerely believed that what they had planned for Iraq could accurately be described as "democracy". But clearly that judgement - that conception of democracy - was a highly questionable and unfamiliar one. It seems that no one in Washington contemplated an Iraq that was 100 per cent owned by the Iraqi population and completely free to make its own choices irrespective of how these may impact upon US interests. Washington's plans were to make the new Iraq a subject nation; not a free one. That much is plain.
Of course, its hard to express this in a sentence, as you must when filing your reports. All I ask is that you don't simply say that the US aimed to make Iraq democratic, since obviously that gives the viewer the sense that the US intended to make Iraq a free country, and that is a good deal less than true. There needs to be an acknowledgement of the reality of the US role; of its aim to assume de facto sovereignty over Iraq in pursuit of its geo-strategic interests. That's the essence of the whole Iraq story, as far as the US aims are concerned. And I think its certainly true that the BBC has not reflected this well in its coverage, sad to say.
Thanks to you both for taking the time to read this. I do hope it influences how you approach this story in the future.
Very best wishes
*****
For more on this topic, see my "Iraqi Democracy and the Limits of Western Idealism" from March 2006.
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Postscript - 22 January 2008.
Just received a belated response from Helen Boaden. Simply reads "Thank you for this thoughtful email", which is nice. Remains to be seen whether my thoughts will influence future coverage, but one lives in hope.
Labels: Democracy, Iraq, Media, Oil, US Imperialism
posted by David Wearing at 2:14 PM
24 Comments:
David,
An interesting but flawed article.
With respect to the US preference that the Iraqis would want to have a government friendly to the US, such is a perfectly reasonable preference, since it was Americans who were shedding blood. We did the same in Germany and Japan, where we still have a very large presence - occupying armies, if you will.
On the other hand, there never was any hope for democracy. The current fad among Muslims is religious identity governance. So long as that is the presence, there will be no peace.
The decision to go to war will not likely be seen by historians as a wise one. However, that the US would hope that a democracy in Iraq would be friendly with the mother of all democracies, the US, is not unreasonable. So, I think your reasoning is wrong.
thanks for your comments, Neal.
The US is of course welcome to hope for whatever Iraqi government it likes, but the choice is for the Iraqis, not the US - at least if we're talking about democracy.
Americans have indeed been shedding blood. Thousands of their troops have died. Its also true that many, many thousands more Iraqis have died.
That's not to mention those Iraqis seriously injured in the violence. Not to mention those incarcerated and tortured by US forces. Not to mention those several million innocent people made refugees. Not to mention those children that have died prematurely as infant mortality has risen amongst the liberated Iraqis. And so on and so on.
So the idea that the Americans get ownership of new Iraq on the basis of their being the ones who have suffered for it is...well, just a little bit silly. But then, one should hardly need to point that out.
David,
Well, were it up to me, there would not have been an Iraq war.
Nonetheless, I note that in the case of Europe and Japan, the governments the US created were created in a manner that made them friendly with the US. And, a lot of people died in WWII.
The assumption - a very poor one - that the US worked with is that the differences between Middle Eastern and American culture are superficial, not profound differences. One might think that a part of the world that still bundles its women away behind a curtain of veils is not all that similar to the West.
Actually, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, polls suggested that the Iraqi public generally favoured democracy over religious leadership. They also preferred a democracy run by secular democrats to a democracy run by religious politicians.
And as you pointed out, the U.S. opposed elections and was forced, reluctantly, to allow them to go ahead by popular Iraqi pressure. So much for those Muslims hating democracy, then...
David,
How could you possibly trust a poll taken in a country under the circumstances that existed in Iraq? That makes no sense.
Polling in the Middle East is notoriously wrong by wide margins. Ask Fatah. And, in a country where there is no basis at all upon which to determine the relevant universe for polling predictions, the chances of a poll being based on the correct universe is close to nill.
It is hard enough in the US - as the primary election in New Hampshire proved, where major polls were off by as much as 17%. In a place like Iraq, to be within 40% would be truly miraculous.
As for the comment that the US was forced into elections by Iraqis, that is nonsense. Not everything the US did was consistent with going forward with elections but, clearly, the US wanted elections, if for no other reason than to justify Americans dying. That, you will note, is a lot more important to an American government facing an election than what Iraqis claimed to want. And, in the US, such was considered important to the public.
What you are doing is hunting for inconsistent facts and then honing the worst imaginable interpretation of them. That is the opposite of what a scholar does.
Neal - you're of course right to say that we should approach any opinion polls with caution. Especially those conducted in difficult circumstances such as these. Such studies can never give us the exact numbers, only broad indications.
However, saying that such polls are utterly meaningless is to take a reasonable level of caution and exaggerate to a slightly ludicrous extent. To say that meaningful statistical data can't be extrapolated from a representative sample in these conditions at all is just a bit over the top I'm afraid. In fact its factually innacurate. Reputable peer-reviewed studies into mortality in Iraq have been carried out, for example by researchers from
Johns Hopkins University, using a broadly similar technique. That methodology's pretty standard.
The polling data available can not prove, but does strongly suggest, a preference for secular democracy over religious governance amongst ordinary Iraqis in early 2004. We can say that much.
By contrast, your statement that "The current fad among Muslims [all 2 billion of them?]is religious identity governance" is a meaningless generalisation made apparently on a superficial and impressionistic basis. And your figure of a 40% margin of error for these polls is, apparently, just plucked out of thin air.
So you'll excuse me if I don't take your view of "what a scholar does" entirely seriously.
"Though Sistani is a Shia leader, he meets Kurdish and Sunni Arab politicians and sees himself as promoting the welfare of the entire country. He has not intervened much in political affairs but has won the fights he has picked with the US. He insisted any permanent Iraqi constitution had to be drafted by delegates elected by popular vote and that any legitimate government must be elected on a one-person one-vote basis, derailing the US plan for a stage-managed election this spring."
That was Juan Cole, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Michigan and one of the world's foremost experts on post-Saddam Iraq, writing in May 2004 - the LMD article I linked to above. If you want to take this up with him - and pit your scholarly credentials against his - I would be quite interested to see that. Lots of luck.
David,
I think that opinion polls in the Middle East are rarely correct. They are often wrong by 30% or more. That is due to a great many reasons. You have named a few reasons. A poll in a war is totally meaningless and it is foolishness which suggests otherwise. There is simply no way to frame the relevant universe.
The idea that Iraqis want secular governance is interesting but meaningless, even if it were true - which I highly doubt. The religious zealots who make all things messy in the Middle East would not stand for it.
As for Professor Cole, he is a scholar who publishes a blog which is more than occasionally careless in its output. So, unless he has written his points in a real book - where I understand his scholarship is not careless (whether or not it is any good being another issue) -, I do not take what he writes in his blog very seriously.
thanks, Neal. Obviously there's no need for me to respond to unsupported assertions, so if that's all you have left I'm content to leave it there.
Regarding Cole's blog, read what another Middle East expert - also renowned - Martin Kramer says about Cole's blog.
You might read Kramer's ongoing list of misstatements from Cole's blog. While I do not frequent Kramer's blog, I have noted it has run a lot about Cole and a lot of what is noted is boneheaded sorts of factual misstatements. Now, maybe Kramer makes his share of errors too. My only point is not to rely on blogs for definitive information. And, on studying what Kramer asserts, there really is good reason to be skeptical about Cole's blog. Of course, since this information comes from another blog, I also express some skepticism about it.
Neal, this is pretty weak stuff.
You're apparently unable to respond to Cole's pointing that Sistani forced concessions on democracy out of the US (unsurprising since its just a simple fact). But clearly you find this hard to bear. So you're reduced to mumbling something about how Cole sometimes makes mistakes on his blog. Hardly addresses the point does it?
And your evidence for Cole's blog being unreliable is...a blog which you yourself admit may be mistaken. What a compelling case you're making.
You'll note that when I quoted Cole in my comment-before-last, I was quoting an article he wrote for Le Monde Diplomatique, not his blog. Which renders your point about "not relying on blogs for definitive information" even less relevant.
But as for Informed Comment, I've read Cole daily for 4 years. When an error of his comes to light - as is bound to happen on a blog written in realtime - he makes a point of correcting it in an open and up-front manner. This is why he's so highly respected and widely read: his approach is meticulous and scrupulously honest.
So its no wonder that his critics are left with such thin gruel, as I find when I follow the link you give. You're right about this much at least: your evidence is indeed unreliable. There's a howler at the very top of the page.
Kramer quotes Cole saying "Bin Laden had wanted to move the [9/11] operation up in response to Sharon's threatening visit to the Temple Mount"
Kramer responds "The report makes it clear that 9/11 was conceived well before Sharon became prime minister of Israel in March 2001."
er...has Kramer even read what he just quoted? Cole wasn't talking about when the operation was "conceived". He was talking about Bin Laden wanting to "move the operation up", i.e. to bring forward an operation that was already conceived of and being planned.
This is of course typical of Kramer's hysterical, mudslinging style. The man is well known as the very worst kind of academic: a servant of power who holds open scholarship in total contempt and tries to smear or silence those he disagrees with instead of honestly debating with them. The man's not fit to do Cole's photocopying, much less question his integrity.
David,
Yours is a convenient re-reading of what Cole stated, as quoted by Kramer. Cole has 9/11 in part as a response to the non-existent Jenin battle - when the battle post dated 9/11.
Further, if you had read Kramer a bit more carefully, you would see that the issue was not just timing but motive. And, the motive was not what Cole says, at least if we go by the 9/11 report. Nice try to rescue Cole from an obvious mistake.
Regarding Cole more generally, I do not think him the great scholar you think him. I note that Yale did not think him all that great a scholar either. Note this:
According to several insiders, Cole's scholarship, which several professors deemed insufficient, was the decisive factor in the final decision against his appointment. Cole faced strong opposition from some of the most senior, influential, and highly-regarded members of Yale's history department, including prominent Yale historians Donald Kagan and John Lewis Gaddis. And that was kiss of death, because the Senior Appointment Committee wants a faculty vote that's nearly unanimous.
In any event, I objected to citing Cole as a source because I do not hold him in the same high regard you do.
As for Kramer, I read his book Ivory Towers on Sand. The article you cite does not accurately present Kramer's point of view. His view is not that the US should or should not play a major role in the world. Rather, his point in the book is that academia has been ignored by the US government because the academic track record has been very poor. I invite you to consider well-known scholar's John Esposito's book The Islamic Threat : Myth or Reality?, where the title pretty much explains the argument. That book had the matter less than correct, since it argued that the threat is exagerated.
I think there is a more important point about Middle East studies, most especially in the US. This point is not noted in Kramer's book but it is a fact nonetheless. 90% of all funding for US Middle East studies comes from one country, Saudi Arabia. As with studies on pollution and cigarettes, scholars do not bad mouth their source of funding. My take is that Middle East scholarship is mostly on the take from that 90% funder and that funder wants the world to view the Arab nations in a kinder light than the evidence supports. And, strangely enough, that is what these on the take scholars find.
Now, I am not mentioning any specific scholar in this. I am merely noting the trend.
Neal - this could continue indefinitely. We now have a familiar pattern with your contributions here. If you can't deal with the substantive point that's being made you simply attack the person that's makes it in the cheapest ad hominem fashion. You raise any weak non-point you can muster - including all manner of unsupported assertions - apparently so that you can simply say something, anything, contradictory. And then when your non-points, weak arguments, or ad hominem attacks are knocked down you simply move swiftly to another pointless/irrelevant/baseless statement.
So I argue that, for various reasons, the claimed US "freedom agenda" of democratisation in Iraq should seen as problematic.
In "response", you say that Juan Cole once made a mistake on his blog about 9/11 and Jenin, and that Middle East scholars are all paid spokespeople for those dastardly Muslim extremists. The fact that you've dragged us so far from the point of the original post is quite revealing.
As I say, this could continue indefinitely, but what would be the point? You're entitled to your beliefs - I'm clearly not going to change your mind. And by now anyone reading our exchanges will have come to their own view on the relative merits of our respective positions.
David,
In other words, you do not like admitting your mistakes.
Again, I agreed with your point that the Iraq war is a mistake. I disagreed with your point that the US opposed setting up a democracy because you cite phony baloney evidence for it.
As for Cole, clearly you prefer not to address the problem that he is not quite the great scholar you think.
yes, Neal. What Cole wrote in his Le Monde Diplomatique article is "phoney baloney" because...he made an error about something else on his blog once. Oh, and he didn't get into Yale.
pure comedy.
Neal obviously enjoys being obnoxious. Maybe he should be pointed to Peace Palestine. Lots of opportunities for generating public contempt, Neal.
btw, given BBC World Service funding, what should one expect of it?
David,
The issue is not one mistake on a blog, it is a pattern of errors - the biggest error being his effort to create a translation for Ahmadinejad which Ahmadinejad himself rejects.
Now then, what was it I said a moment ago?
You raise any weak non-point you can muster - including all manner of unsupported assertions - apparently so that you can simply say something, anything, contradictory. And then when your non-points, weak arguments, or ad hominem attacks are knocked down you simply move swiftly to another pointless/irrelevant/baseless statement.
So now you want to talk about Ahmadinejad? Sorry, Neal. I don't think so. We could talk indefinitely about how Iran funds 90% of people who say things you disagree with, or maybe its 80%, and so on etc. But really. You've entertained us long enough.
David,
My point was about Cole, a source you cited. Read it more carefully.
I know what your "point" is Neal. Sistani did not successfully apply pressure on the US to more properly adhere to democratic principles in Iraq because.....er.....because you think Juan Cole got something about Ahmadinejad wrong. It hangs together beautifully.
What's particularly comical, Neal, is that you think that by flinging a but of mud at Cole you can simply magic the factual record out of existence. You appear to believe that you can say history never happened just because you don't like the person who tells you about it.
CNN reported Tuesday 20th January 2004 that
"[On] Monday [19/1/04] ... nearly 100,000 Shiites marched in the Iraqi capital to demand early, direct elections, rejecting a U.S. blueprint for handing over power on July 1 to an unelected Iraqi provisional government.
Faced with the growing Shiite opposition, the United States asked the United Nations on Monday to send a team to Iraq to see if elections could be held. U.S. officials hope the team would conclude that early elections are not feasible and convince Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani to drop his demand for them."
Exactly as I described. Exactly as Cole described. Exactly as described by all the other reporting news agencies.
Perhaps you will now tell us that CNN (and everyone else) once made a mistake about something, or that 140% of CNN's (and everyone else's) funding comes from Osama Bin Laden or somesuch. As I've said, the game you're playing is one that can be played indefinitely by someone who, it now seems clear to me, is not arguing in good faith. Which is why this is my final response to you.
David,
CNN is a source. Cole is a commentator. Do you understand the difference? Evidently not.
The CNN source, however, does not support your position, if it is that the US did not favor a democracy and was forced into it. That, you will note, ignores the fact that the US worked prior to the time you cite, working on drafting a supposedly feasible constitution. The issue, as I recall it, was to do things in an order believed more likely to lead to an actual constitutional arrangement.
To American minds, written constitutions are very important and a necessary precursor to a democratic arrangement.
On the topic of Sistani, this is what Professor Feldman - who helped draft the Iraqi constitution - told Congress on the general topic at hand - although this testimony pre-dated the event you cite by a few months:
On the other hand, the Coalition should not automatically reject suggestions for a national referendum to approve or vote down a slate of candidates selected by the Governing Council. Without some component of public affirmation, there is the risk that the constitutional convention would be seen as illegitimate from day one. A widely distributed fatwa, authored by moderate Shi‘i cleric ‘Ali Sistani, demanded some sort of public participation in the process of selecting the convention, and asserted that a convention handpicked by the Coalition would not represent the values of the Iraqi people. Although it is not certain that Sistani would actively condemn a convention selected by the Iraqi members of the Governing Council, a general sense among Iraqi elites is that some sort of public affirmation process would do much to enhance the legitimacy of the constitutional process. I am confident that a solution can be reached, and that the constitutional convention, once named, can begin its work of drafting a constitution for ratification by the Iraqi people.
It is difficult to imagine elections being held under a new constitution before next autumn at the very soonest -- and perhaps later still. The constitution will have to resolve complex questions of the boundaries of the provinces in a new, federal Iraq, not to mention ensuring religious liberty and equality and finding the right form of government to manage Iraq's distinctive ethno-religious mix. Getting the wrong answers to these questions quickly would be much worse than taking some time to get the right answers. But rushing would be a mistake in any event, because an elected Iraqi government would come too soon if it predated effective control of the country. [Emphasis added]
Note that he was working on the Iraqi Constitution with Iraqis when, on your theory, the US was not working to build a democracy.
Somehow, the US government is much, much too parsimonious to spend money working to create an election system it was not attempting to create.
With this, Neal, your dishonesty has reached new levels. And as a result, you've got yourself banned.
I was warned some time ago that you were a well-known troll and that I should treat you as one, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed you were posting here in good faith. The sheer dishonesty of your latest effort, as the culmination of your performance thus far, makes it quite clear that I was mistaken.
You say
"The CNN source, however, does not support your position, if it is that the US did not favor a democracy and was forced into it."
And you pretend that I'd said that the US was not "working to create an election system"
You're apparently a person of at least moderate intelligence, and clearly you care a great deal about what's written on this blog. So you know perfectly well that I said from the outset of the original post:
"...the US planned to leave in place an Iraqi government that was legitimised by some form of electoral system. But the bottom line was that this government should be friendly to US strategic interests. The US therefore set about engineering a "democracy" that would lead to this outcome"
And while you triumphantly quote Feldman speaking of his plans for Iraqi democracy, you know very well that I'd said in the original post:
"I have no doubt that Washington planners sincerely believed that what they had planned for Iraq could accurately be described as "democracy". But clearly that judgement - that conception of democracy - was a highly questionable and unfamiliar one."
I argued, as you know, that the US attempted to manage the birth of Iraqi democracy in such a way as to create a friendly government, that it was pursuing various other policies - economic, military and democratic - to constrain Iraqi sovereignty, and that all this is inconsistent with the principles of genuine democracy. You have ignored this and instead pretended my position was that the US did not want elections at all.
Not once - in a week - have you engaged with the substance of my argument. You have made every effort to avoid the what I actually said, prefering instead to fling as much slime as you could gather up in the hope that something would stick. You have resorted to ad hominem attacks on sources (a world-renowned authority on the Middle East is indeed a source, not a "commentator"). You have resorted to entirely unsupported assertions (90% of ME academic funding from Saudi Arabia etc) whilst I have backed each point I've made with evidence. In short, you have thoroughly abused my willingness to debate openly on the basis of the facts.
This comment facility is for honest, open, fact-based discussion. You are contributing the opposite. I'm under no obligation to allow you to abuse this facility in this way. All further posts of yours will be deleted. You are free to exercise your freedom of speech elsewhere.
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