It was doomed from the start by a fatal constitutional flaw: proportional representation.
Washington waits and waits while constantly demanding that Iraq’s government function properly—that its leaders compromise and work together, that it at least provide electricity, trash pick-up, and minimal services to its citizens. Yet all this is impossible because of the structure of government America set up there. Hopelessly dysfunctional, it was doomed from the start.
There is simply no way Iraq’s government could or can succeed. Think first how we destroyed its civil structure—its police, civil service, most of its functions of government, even schoolteachers were fired en masse. Then it’s easier to comprehend that Washington also set up an unworkable government. Indeed, an article in the American Prospect, “The Apprentice,” indicates that wrecking Iraq as a nation state was intentional. According to the article, David Wurmser, who subsequently became Vice President Cheney’s principal foreign-policy adviser
[urged] in 1997: that if Saddam Hussein were driven from power, Iraq would be “ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” and out of the “coming chaos in Iraq and most probably in Syria,” the United States and her principal allies, namely Israel and Jordan, could redraw the region’s map.
Generally there is little American understanding or concern for how foreign governments function, especially their electoral systems. Our policy is usually just to promote an election and then classify a nation as having achieved democracy. Rarely do we define the institutional requirements that can guarantee limited government, protection of minority views and populations, accountability of government officials, the rule of law, property rights, an independent judiciary, and the host of other prerequisites necessary to make democracies work.
Indeed, not only does Washington typically ignore the traditions of government that already exist in the nations we attempt to reconstruct, but our bureaucrats do not even heed the lessons of Anglo-American political history. Instead of devising a system at all like our own, professional state-builders take inspiration from an idea hatched in the faculty lounge: proportional representation.
Iraq’s constitution has several mortal failings—
Proportional representation (PR) is a system whereby voting is based on party lists of candidates chosen by the party’s leadership. Voters do not get to choose individual candidates and may not know anything about many of the names on the list. A party receives a number of seats in the legislature proportional to its percentage of the popular vote. The candidates awarded seats are taken in order from the top of the party’s list. The PR system is much liked by political leaders because they can always put their own names high on the list and thus virtually ensure their perpetual re-election. But even lower-ranking candidates are not fully accountable to the voters because their first allegiance is to the party bosses who manage the lists.
This electoral system is bad enough in the best of circumstances, but to make matters worse the whole of Iraq is treated as a single electoral district, the worst kind of PR. (In some PR systems there are multiple districts and candidates may have some concern for local interests.) PR can provide effective government in small, homogeneous nations such as in Scandinavia, but for larger nations it is not effective. The system causes most voters to vote along ethnic or tribal lines because they fear that others are voting that way too. For example, if Shi’ites are voting for other Shi’ites, Sunnis will tend to vote for other Sunnis to counter them.
Contrast this to the systems of the United States and Great Britain, where majority coalitions can fracture and recombine along lines of local and economic self-interest. In the Anglo-Saxon system, voters are represented by candidates whom they can know, who are accountable to their districts, focused on local issues, and who can be voted out individually.
PR, by contrast, gives inordinate swing power in coalition government to very small minority parties (as I explain with other factors in earlier article, “Problems of Proportional Representation”). An excellent analysis by Michael Greve at the American Enterprise Institute considers other flaws with the PR systems that “well-meaning UN officials, NGOs, and U.S. advisers” have imposed on “numerous fledgling democracies, including Iraq.” He warned that Iraq’s “constitution puts a hydra-headed executive at the mercy of the parliament.” Moreover, Greve explains, Iraq’s PR system makes a mockery of federalism: “In conflicts between regional and federal law, regional law shall prevail—thus providing potent incentives to extort fiscal transfers.”
Kanan Makia of Brandeis University detailed other problems five years ago in the New York Times. He foresaw that the constitution would “further weaken the already failing central Iraqi state” because it created “a supremely powerful Parliament” which was in reality an “artificially constructed collection of ethnic and sectarian voting block.” The president and prime minister can be dismissed by a simple majority vote in the single-house Parliament. In addition, “the constitution encourages the transformation of governorates and local administrations into powerful, nearly sovereign regions … while the articles dealing with executive power … encourage new regions to be created at the expense of the federal union.”
“The constitution may well be more of a prelude to civil war than a step forward,” warned another expert in 2005, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Rather than an inclusive document, it is more a recipe for separation based on Shiite and Kurdish privilege,” he wrote, as quoted in an article by Robin Wright in the Washington Post. The Post report also warned that “the Shiite and Kurdish militias are the de facto security forces in their territories and are loyal to their own political leaders.”
By 2006, then CIA director Michael Hayden was acknowledging that in Iraq, “the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible.” He added, “We and the Iraqi government do not agree on who the enemy is … . It’s a legitimate question whether strengthening the Iraqi security forces helps or hurts, when they are viewed as a predatory element.”
In 2007, Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s former president, now vying for power, also explained in the New York Times how proportional representation stymied effective government.
It is scarcely worth mentioning that Iraq is far different from the cases of Japan and Germany after World War II. Comparing them is preposterous. Germany and Japan were functioning, ordered states with cohesive populations. They confronted a Communist danger that threatened to swallow them if they failed to rebuild. They also had strong, competent American generals in charge of occupation—and it is interesting to note that General Patton refused demands from Washington that he dismiss all low-level German government official, many of whom had been Nazi Party members, as was done with Baathists in Iraq. In Japan, General MacArthur also kept on regional government functionaries. He drafted a realistic constitution criticized by many Japanese for not using vague and consensus-focused language in accordance with their traditions. Yet to this day, the Japanese have not substantially changed it.
The nearly decade-long U.S. occupation of Iraq has been in vain. We are certainly not “building democracy.” Nor has the entire misadventure served our own national interest. Indeed, we are now nearly bankrupted and less safe as al-Qaeda grows and Muslims all over the world see Iraq’s American-created “democracy” as dysfunctional and discredited. Who today would trust the U.S. to create a democracy in Afghanistan or Iran?
Washington’s neoconservatives may look benignly on an Iraq whose dysfunctional government serves as an excuse to keep the region occupied with 50,000 troops and massive air bases. But America’s “mission accomplished” has created an unstable, economically devastated nation that will be yet another constant source of instability for the whole Middle East.
Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative.
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Correction: It was doomed the instant that “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (HA! Good one!) began.
The people may or may not have eventually overthrown Saddam, but the invasion and occupation have guaranteed that the place goes to Shi’ite at the end of next year. Get out before then, if you can: Staying longer shall make no difference whatsoever.
Given our idiotic intervention we should have partitioned the country via plebisite along sectarian lines. The Sunni’s with some of the oil fields would have been a useful additon to Jordan. The Kurds have already as much as achieved autonomy and the rump Shia area might have looked to us as a guarantor against Iran.
and the conscript american army in 1945 contained harvard lawyers and michigan small businessmen and oklahoma college students and californian civil engineers and texas farmers, not an exclusive cadre of volunteer trained killers taught to follow orders blindly. i suspect had the uniformed americans who ‘designed’ post-war iraq designed post-war germany, we’d have all wanted hitler back.
” Rarely do we define the institutional requirements that can guarantee limited government, protection of minority views and populations, accountability of government officials, the rule of law, property rights, an independent judiciary…”
You’re kidding, right? Limited, accountable government? Guaranteed? Our own institutions fail to even allow for these things. Nation building should be a capitol crime.
The sad truth, as I see it at six months shy of my sixtieth birthday, is that democratic institutions fare no better than the people who participate in them.
Freedom spurs some people to build great centers of learning, commerce and government, and others to declare the right to walk the streets with their pants hanging beneath their butts.
People who utterly lack the capacity to “get” the concept of “the common good” will pervert the most intelligently devised democratic structure.
Years ago when that mob, with hoods on their heads, chanted the name of their tribal leader as they lead Saddam to the gallows (HE was the only one who showed any manly dignity in that shameless scene), I gave up any notion that Iraq would be “democratic”.
Proportional representation (PR) is a system whereby voting is based on party lists of candidates chosen by the party’s leadership. Voters do not get to choose individual candidates and may not know anything about many of the names on the list. A party receives a number of seats in the legislature proportional to its percentage of the popular vote.
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That is not neccessarly aflaw and is used in more than one country. It’s just the European way of doing things. Which doesn’t mean it is a flaw.
This electoral system is bad enough in the best of circumstances, but to make matters worse the whole of Iraq is treated as a single electoral district, the worst kind of PR. (In some PR systems there are multiple districts and candidates may have some concern for local interests.) PR can provide effective government in small, homogeneous nations such as in Scandinavia, but for larger nations it is not effective. The system causes most voters to vote along ethnic or tribal lines because they fear that others are voting that way too. For example, if Shi’ites are voting for other Shi’ites, Sunnis will tend to vote for other Sunnis to counter them.
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Again not a bad system. Sounds like the author’s problem is that the system is not like America.
Okay after reading more of the article I can see that this author is mad that this government isn’t like America’s. Once again the West is mad that people don’t live the way they do.
Iraq’s problem is they got inexpierenced opposition groups trying to run a government. They fired all the Baathists who were expierenced at beauacracies and replaced them with people who were opposition groups/American stooges.
Maybe it’s time to get EVERYBODY out of Iraq.
The 50’000 “non-combat” troops are nothing more than a scam, since ALL military personnel are combat-trained. I speak as a career military man and Vietnam veteran.
Then there are those “contractors” (read Blackwater) whose numbers rival the troop count before the “withdrawal”.
It’s plain as the nose on your face that we’re in Iraq to steal their oil, period.
Rather than focus on Iraq’s dysfunctional “democracy”, we should be looking to restore what’s left of OURS
We INTENTIONALLY designed it to fail…Because of the kind of people that control this country..Christians ( real Christians; Catholic and E. Orthodox ) were protected under the old regime..Saddam was as close to a benevolent dictator as they’ll ever see again probably…At least they were a sovereign country…I wish we hadn’t duped our ally Saddam ( “We have no interest in arab-to-arab disputes such as….” ) but afterwards I wish we had allowed our ally ( Saddam ) to keep ( re-take actually ) Kuwait so he would have more oil TO SELL…Instead Iraq is destroyed and the Zionists want to wag the American dog into Iran…Wonderful..
Moderate your ass…The authors of the LaVon Affair ( dressed as arabs blowing up US/UK facilities in Cairo, Alexandria ) and the deliberate attack on the USS Liberty are the REAL problem in the ME..
Proportional representation ensures that the politics of a country won’t degenerate in a situation where two big indistinguishable catch-all parties vie for the votes of mainstream centrist independents and consequently offer a watered-down program and governing. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is in rhetorics and form, not in substance.
“This electoral system is bad enough in the best of circumstances, but to make matters worse the whole of Iraq is treated as a single electoral district, the worst kind of PR. (In some PR systems there are multiple districts and candidates may have some concern for local interests.)”
Actually, it’s the other way round. PR with single electoral district is the most representative, hence it delivers what it promises. Combine multiple small electoral districts and Imperiali counting method and the PR renders results even more disproportional than the first-past-the-post system.
Also, there are indeed modifications to PR that ensure voters can pick a candidate they really want. You can give prefferential votes, vote across party lines etc.
But I agree that letting USA to impose PR on Iraq wasn’t the smartest choice since they obviously lack the necessary experience with it to set it up successfully. And the success of democracy doesn’t ultimately rely on the electoral system anyway, it is a matter of the will of the people.
PR-in its various forms- is the norm among the world’s democracies. FPTP is basically confined to the US, UK, Canada and India.
“This electoral system is bad enough in the best of circumstances, but to make matters worse the whole of Iraq is treated as a single electoral district, the worst kind of PR.”
The exact system used in Netherlands and Israel.
IN any case, the idea of creating a liberal democracy in Iraq seems to be absurd mission-regardless of the voting system.
PR has a purpose!!!!
You think they use PR accidentally (by stuipidity) or to be politically correct? Even many authoritarian regimes with parliaments use PR, ***particularly when they are socially fragmented***. If you have lots of ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic communities, PR gives everyone a place in parliament, but does not allow any to become overly powerful. Then parliament is just a debating club with little formal power, but the risk of revolution or sucession is decreased. If you have FPTP (first-past-the-post), then Sunnis, Kurds, and Shi’a will be represented, but NO Christians, NO Yezidi, NO Turkmen, NO Sunnis outside the West of the country, NO Kurds outside Kurdistan, and likely few to NO secular/non-communitarian republican candidates, etc. In PR, if a Kurd lives in Baghdad, and he votes for a Kurdish list, the Kurdish list represents him. In FPTP, a Kurd candidate might get 3% and he would be forced to vote for a Sunni or Shi’a.
With FPTP, the Shi’a would automatically have almost 2/3 of the seats, and, unless they are particularly fragmented, then al-Maliki is assured a majority. Is that what America wants?
Is it a surprise, then, that they have PR?
So, according to Jon Basil Utley, Americans set up dysfunctional governments, we wrecked Iraq as a nation state intentionally, we have no understanding or concern of how foreign governments function, we destroy governments militarily for the sole purpose of promoting an election, we ignore the traditions of existing governments, and we know nothing of PR. Mr. Utley also uses quotes that are 4 or 5 years old to bolster his point (hey, we can’t be concerned about what is actually happening today).
By reading Mr. Utley’s piece of “Slam America” literature, it’s a wonder our military even knows how to tie its shoes in the morning. I hope Mr. Utley takes a job educating our military and our government, for apparently, without his input, we are doomed to fail for a lack of intelligence. At least when compared to his.
Slam America? Well, JRW, it’s apparent you see one homogenous unit .
Excellent article. PR works well only in tiny countries with constitutional monarchies. In large republics, PR opens the door to tyrants. Hitler is the most clear example. It is sad that this fact is not appreciated in the U.S.
If you have FPTP (first-past-the-post), then Sunnis, Kurds, and Shi’a will be represented, but NO Christians, NO Yezidi, NO Turkmen, NO Sunnis outside the West of the country, NO Kurds outside Kurdistan, and likely few to NO secular/non-communitarian republican candidates, etc. In PR, if a Kurd lives in Baghdad, and he votes for a Kurdish list, the Kurdish list represents him. In FPTP, a Kurd candidate might get 3% and he would be forced to vote for a Sunni or Shi’a.
At which point Sunni and Shi’ite politicians are forced to compete for the votes the votes they can find in those other communities, rather than keeping their own religious and ethnic constituencies sewn up through demagoguery. If they had copied America’s (original) federalist polity along with her single-representative districts, they could have kept identity politics local, while keeping central politics diverse.
Iraqis had the bad fortune of being conquered by a nation that had lost hope in every element of her own identity save military dominance and jacobinism. The irony is that, while 1830′s America would never have consented to engage in nation-building, if it had, it would have produced something far more humane and enduring than what we possibly could today.
[...] democracy (proportional representation) differs from domestic democracy (direct elections) and the dysfunctional foundations of Iraq’s government that may have been intentionally crippled to guarantee a [...]
[...] democracy (proportional representation) differs from domestic democracy (direct elections) and the dysfunctional foundations of Iraq’s government that may have been intentionally crippled to guarantee a [...]
[...] tell you that everything is just hunky dory in Mesopotamia now, but alas I cannot – as noted here… Washington waits and waits while constantly demanding that Iraq’s government function [...]
Why should a government provide electricity, trash pickup, or ANY service more basic than protection of property (including persons)?
This would be bad (and like it is here in America) even IF the government did provide these basic services (and a whole lot more, like here in America).