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Will Anyone Notice When They’re Gone?

It isn’t exactly the redeployment Warner and Lugar want.  American forces may not be going to the cooler heights of Kurdistan anytime soon, but it seems likely that some Iraqi parliamentarians will be taking their holidays there.  They did already give up their July vacation time and have still managed to go nowhere with any of the legislative agenda […]

It isn’t exactly the redeployment Warner and Lugar want.  American forces may not be going to the cooler heights of Kurdistan anytime soon, but it seems likely that some Iraqi parliamentarians will be taking their holidays there.  They did already give up their July vacation time and have still managed to go nowhere with any of the legislative agenda before them.  The worst thing that can be said of the Iraqi parliament is that it is irrelevant whether or not it is in session in August or at any time thereafter.  The final results in terms of legislation and political reconciliation will be roughly the same. 

It should be noted, however, that the Iraqi parliament’s failure to pass any part of its legislative agenda (e.g., de-Baathification law, hydrocarbon law, provincial elections, etc.) is much like the larger Iraqi “failure” to build a functioning self-governing political system: success requires Iraq to be radically different in its ethnic and sectarian makeup from the way that Iraq actually is.  The entire enterprise has been set up to fail, and under these circumstances condemning Iraqi failure or Iraqi stubbornness or whatever it is that opportunistic pols would now like to blame for their failure to serve the interests of the American people is a bit like blaming the rain for being wet.  It may feel good to say it, but it is ridiculous.  The old knock on the Great Society seems applicable here: if you wanted to create a political system designed to maximise communal hatred, violence and non-cooperation, you could not have done much better than the government has done in Iraq.  (This is not to say that democratisation in Iraq could have been done if it had been handled differently, but it might not have resulted in such a terrific explosion of violence and deepening communal resentment.) 

The ’05 elections sharply politicised ethnicity and sectarian identity, encouraging the communalist violence that was already beginning, and the parties that prevailed in those elections reinforced and nurtured those divisions (divisions that are vital for their continued hold on power).  Now the government and parliament, which had its origins in this rather dreadful process, cannot find any consensus and so can pass no major laws, since there is virtually no sufficient minimal degree of common identity and shared priorities among the members.  This is a snapshot of the fatal flaw of Iraq as a “nation-state” that has explained much of its history in the 20th century.  As I’m sure others have said before, since there is no nation in Iraq, there will tend to be a great emphasis on the state as a substitute for a lack of any organic unity or natural affinities.  

In less obviously despotic systems, the state’s role in a multiethnic society is also bound to increase, either in its role of policing communal quarrels or as an instrument used in compelling a certain degree of good relations between different groups and through an institutional apparatus designed to protect minority interests.  It seems plausible that social solidarity will decrease as diversity increases, but it is by no means assured that the state will become either smaller or less intrusive as a result.  Lacking anything else, multiethnic societies will find their common loyalty in the institutions of the state or the state will use those institutions to coerce obedience of the different groups (or these societies will have some combination of the two).  The more “successful” multiethnic states have, in most cases, divvied up power among the different groups in some fashion or have attempted to act as a supposedly unbiased mediator of the different groups’ interests (this is the Austrian model, at least when it actually functioned properly).  Whenever the central state has become too closely identified with one group, the state tends either to resort to repressive measures against the increasingly alienated members of other groups (this has been the case with Iraq), or it will seek (usually in vain) to accommodate the demands of the other ethnicities, which can result in the complete breakup of the state (especially when, after a defeat in war, the central state has lost a large part of its authority with all member nations).  Lost on the democratists, as usual, is any awareness that it is mass democracy itself that makes imitation of the Austrian model all but impossible and makes it more likely that multiethnic societies will tend to suffer the fate of Iraq or Ivory Coast.

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