Democracy 1, Terrorism 0
Dave Price
In the most important news since the passing of the referendum, the Sunnis have now officially capitulated to democracy.
"We call upon all Iraqis to participate actively in the elections and not listen to calls for boycotts because they are harmful," the new alliance, called the Iraqi Accord Front, said in a statement.
Will this end the violence? No. Will it increasingly de-legitimize it? Yes.
The fact this announcement was made shows the sea change in Iraq since January, when no Sunni group dared endorse the electoral process, let alone run, for fear of being targeted by the terrorist/Baathist factions. Look for a lot of stumbling blocks in the months ahead, including things like repeated Sunni threats to quit the legislature once elected, assassinations of MPs, blatant corruption, and of course in the background the everpresent media doomsaying regarding the whole enterprise of Iraqi democracy.
The dogs will bark, but the caravan of freedom and democracy will move on. The Iraqis will increasingly handle their own security (and U.S. troops will begin to depart), the Iraqi media will play a larger and larger watchdog role, liberal institutions like women's rights groups will sprout and grow, and the predictions of civil war will join the discredited memes of theocracy, stolen oil, and Arab unfitness for democracy in the dustbin of history.
We all hope this is true, but at this point it is still only a hope. My fear is that we have rushed this process too much.
One point, there already is a civil war going on in Iraq. The question now is how long will it last.
To the extent there is now civil war, it is one that has gone on for decades, with Sunni oppressing Shia and Kurd. Generally, when critics talk about the possibility of "civil war" they mean open war, with pitched battles between Shia and Sunni or Sunni and Kurd and massacres of towns and villages, as happened in 1991. That possibility has always been pretty remote, as remote as the theocracy meme or the idea America was going to steal all the oil.
Yes. The British left the Sunni in charge of Iraq and told them to keep the Shia and Kurds in line, which they did, killing hundreds of thousands of Shia and Kurds in the process.
Is Iraq a country that can be held together without this kind of use of violence on its citizens? I do not think we know. In this respect Iraq may be similar to Yugoslavia, which once the repressive communist regime collapsed, broke apart into several countries with wars between them over borders.
As long as the US has substantial forces in Iraq, open pitch battles are all but impossible. The US forces have a huge technological advantage and will slaughter any insurgents that attempt a pitch battle. The Iraq army currently lacks the heavy armor and airpower to have this same advantage. The US can continue to provide air support for the Iraqi army, but it is unclear when the Iraqi army will get heavy armor.
Those massacres happened only in the last couple decades. The Hashemite monarchy was actually elected in a 1921 plebiscite, the British left in 1932, and Hashemite rule was relatively bloodless through 1958, when the strongmen took over. Before the British, they were provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The Iraq army currently lacks the heavy armor and airpower to have this same advantage. The US can continue to provide air support for the Iraqi army, but it is unclear when the Iraqi army will get heavy armor.
They actually have a heavy mechanized division, albeit a rudimentary one, with tanks. It guards the airport road. They're also getting several hundred mini-Strykers. And of course they'll have U.S. air support indefinitely.
It is true that the ‘massacres’ before 1958 were smaller than those after 1958, and especially those after 1979 when Saddam Hussein came to power, but I would hardly describe it as “relatively bloodless”. From the time Iraq became independent in 1932 there was political instability, frequent changes of government, uprisings by tribal leaders, military intervention in government affairs, and massacres like the 1933 Assyrian massacre. The British also re-occupied Iraq in 1941 and granted it independence again after WWII.
The first Kurdish “war” was in 1968 at a time of political instability. To settle that problem the Kurds were promised autonomous self-rule in 1970. In 1974 the Ba’th party attempted to implement its version of self-rule for the Kurds, but excluded oil-rich Kirkuk from the self-rule zone. That led to another Kurdish war in 1974. There was yet another Kurdish war in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.
This question of whether Kirkuk will be part of the Kurdish self-rule zone is a still unsettled question today in the new Iraqi constitution. Kurds insist it must be part of the Iraqi Kurdish self-rule zone, and there is a good chance they may go to war again if they don’t get their way.
My main point, though, was that the Hashemites were relatively benign monarchs. They were elected by plebiscite and built consensus; they did not have to kill hundreds of thousands of Shia and Kurds to keep the country together. Only the Sunni military strongmen resorted to such measures, because they were Stalinists and wanted absolute rule, not consensual government.