Iraq’s Political Disputes Are Just Like Everywhere Else…Right?
Fred Kagan argues in the Weekly Standard that even though there hasn’t been national reconciliation or the passage of the much vaunted oil bill, we shouldn’t be worried, because democracies have issues like this all the time:
As the violence recedes, leaders in all the contending Iraqi communities will naturally seek to address their internal differences. Our interest in the outcome is limited: As long as the Iraqis are committed to the principle of resolving their differences through a political process rather than violence, and as long as any settlement they reach is sufficiently fair so as not to reignite the violence, then our interests will have been secured. The Iraqis can continue to debate the oil law, provincial rights, federalism, and so on for decades (as Americans have debated civil rights, Social Security, immigration, health care, and states rights) with no harm to our interests, assuming their debates are channeled through a political process. And this is almost certainly what will happen. Even if the current Iraqi parliament passed all the benchmark legislation Americans desire tomorrow, Iraqis would continue to debate, argue, adjust, and press for reforms on these key issues, probably for generations. That is what a self-governing people does.
Kagan’s analogy and his argument more generally fail because he wildly understates the gravity of political disagreements. What’s being debated in Iraq isn’t the “normal” stuff of politics like tax rates or the proper scope of entitlement spending, but instead the foundational issues of a polity: how should income from our greatest natural resource be distributed, how much power should we give to our large and ever more homogenous regions and other questions on those level. Kagan’s argument also relies on the premise that the violence is foreign born — ie from Iran and Al Qaeda in Iraq. If the violence were coming from the very secretarian forces who are responsible for the permanent deadlock in Iraqi political institutions, than Kagan wouldn’t be able to say that violence can recede first, then the Iraqi political system can operate normally. But since the violence, from both Shia militia and Sunni insurgents (AQ in Iraq being a small and shrinking force), is an expression of those political conflicts and is rooted in a struggle for power that isn’t being effectively adjudicated in Iraq’s political institutions, it’s seems pollyannaish to hope that the recent decreasing violence will allow for Iraq’s politics to operate normally.
