Deferring democracy (16 January 2004)

Published in Labour Left Briefing (February 2004)

When Tony Blair visited the US Congress in July last year, he thumped his chest and hollered: "We promised Iraq democratic government. We will deliver it." Sadly, he didn't propose a timescale, a mechanism or a definition of democracy. The more blunt-speaking officials of the present US administration were on hand to do some of that: in early April, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, spoke of a six month timeline; Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Wolfowitz's assertion. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary under whose responsibility Iraq has been governed since the invasion, spoke on 13 April of national elections "over some period of months".

Then it started to go palpably, bloodily wrong. The Iraqi exiles, principally the faction leaders who had spent most of the past forty years in the West and had aligned themselves with the neocons, had vowed that Iraqis in the country were already looking to them for leadership and would flock to their ranks. Elections would install them in power, and many years of happy alliance with the US would follow. Someone in Washington believed them.

But the recruits didn't come knocking on the doors of the Iraqi National Accord, the favourite of the State Department, or the Iraqi National Congress, created by a Washington PR firm and using Richard Perle as its de facto spokesman for much of the 1990s. They turned instead to parties or groupings that looked with much greater suspicion at the US and its army of occupation: the Iraqi Islamic Party, an offshoot (like Hamas in Palestine) of the Muslim Brotherhood; the Sadr II movement, led by someone who calls the US the "Great Satan"; and the hawza (the traditional religious seat of learning) in Najaf, whose predominant figure, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has refused to meet Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). None of these new political forces were in any way supportive of Saddam (and some, such as the IIP, are cooperating with the CPA); but none of them are in hock to Washington. And that was troubling.

So, the US put off national elections. Officially, this was an agreement on 15 November between the CPA and the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), which is a bit like an agreement between a ventriloquist and her dummy. Now, in each of Iraq's 18 governorates, an "organising committee" will be established, appointed by the CPA, the IGC and US-appointed local councils. Each organising committee will establish a "caucus", which in turn will elect "representatives" to the transitional national assembly (TNA). The TNA will then elect an executive, and it is that executive who will take over Iraq's government from the end of June this year. If this stitch-up doesn't sound particularly democratic, you can be sure that one individual taken into custody in December would understand it perfectly well as such.

The 15 November agreement envisions actual elections by the end of 2005 - almost three years after the invasion. The official reason for putting off the elections is that a census needs to be carried out first, and Iraq is too chaotic at the moment to conduct a census. How this fits with US and UK claims that the vast majority of Iraq is perfectly safe and orderly, and the violence is due to just a few remnants and foreigners, isn't quite clear. A full list of Iraq's population already exists, in the form of the ration list (which the CPA has administered since November): Ayatollah al-Sistani's querying of why this can't simply be adapted for an election roll has never been answered.

Of course, the real reason for the delay is that the US still hopes that factions closely aligned with Washington will be able to use the time to build a support base inside Iraqi society. Few if any think that this will come through an appeal to a particular vision of the nation's future. Instead, it could only come about through the creation of networks of patronage: Washington's favourites are already helping to select which "civic groups" and "tribal shaikhs" should receive funding from the CPA. As these parties take over the government of Iraq and gain direct control over the oil revenues, they hope to coopt existing social forces and strengthen the grip of compliant local leaders.

This explains why the CPA has recently been throwing resources at selected "tribal leaders", whose authority has been on the wane for around two hundred years. When Britain ruled Iraq, it provided gold and bayonets to tribal shaikhs to act as little tyrants who could coerce the population into paying taxes to the British. No surprise then that the man now in control of the tribal affairs bureau of the CPA told the press recently that he uses a British report from 1918 as his guide to Iraq's tribes.

With the capture of Saddam Hussein, anti-Ba'thist sectors of Iraqi society no longer fear that the Americans are needed to keep the former tyrant at bay. They are more likely to take to protest at the US occupation. On 15 January, tens of thousands took the streets of Basra to demand elections within six months. When it comes to a choice between preventing popular non-clientelistic leaders from taking power and defusing the potential for mass civil disorder, the US has a track record in taking the first of those options. There are few signs yet that there may be a serious change of course.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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