HOW TO WAGE THE PEACE
Artículo de Fareed Zakaria, en “Newsweek” del 21-4-03
Improving on Saddam’s rule will be easy. (Hint: Don’t gas people.) But democracy will take hard work. Don’t believe oil riches will make it easier. And above all, don’t rush it
April 21 issue — As American armies were sweeping through Iraq last week, the 101st Airborne Division went into the city of Najaf in the south, the heartland of Shiite Islam. A journalist from The New York Times stopped a waving bystander and asked him what he hoped the Americans would bring to Iraq. The man shouted out four words, one louder than the other. “Democracy,” he cried. “Whisky. And sexy.” Who says the American Dream has lost its appeal?
IT WILL
NOT take much effort to bring whisky and sex to Iraq—if indeed they ever left.
But bringing democracy to a region that has not known it will be more
complicated.
With the war won, pundits and policy wonks—who are quickly replacing
generals on television screens—have a new refrain: “Now comes the hard part.” In
an important sense, this is wrong. It will not be difficult for America to make
Iraq a better place than it was. The first step, disarming small bands of thugs,
might involve bloodshed. The second, creating order, will require a much deeper
American involvement in policing. It might take some time. But it is hardly
insurmountable.
Improving on Saddam Hussein’s tyranny is going to be easy. If the next government of Iraq does not routinely imprison, torture and gas its people, institute a reign of terror, systematically persecute the Shiites and the Kurds, and steal the lion’s share of national resources for the Army and secret police, then it will be a better government than Iraqis have had for three decades. Many problems lie ahead, but eliminating Saddam’s regime is a huge leap forward for Iraq.
DANGER
AND OPPORTUNITY
America’s goal, however, is much broader—to create a lasting and genuine
democracy. For many who supported the war, like myself, the threat from Iraq was
real. But more important than the danger was the opportunity. Here was a chance
to rid the Arab world of a monstrous dictatorship and to help foster a new model
for Arab politics. This is the real prize, and it will come only through hard
work. While the skill of the U.S. military and a technological revolution have
made it easier to win wars, building democracy, reshaping a political culture
and creating new mind-sets are as complex as they ever were. If done right,
helping create a new Iraq will be the greatest foreign-policy project America
has undertaken in a generation.
President George W. Bush has often said that America wants to help build
democracy in Iraq. He has also said that America will hand over power to Iraqis
as soon as possible. These are, of course, the politically correct things to
say. Washington does not want to look like an occupying power. But the history
of political and economic reform around the world suggests that building
democracy in Iraq will require a prolonged American or international presence.
We can leave fast or we can nurture democracy, but we cannot do both.
This is not because the Iraqi people don’t want democracy or aren’t
capable of it. The scenes of liberated Baghdad should remind us—as did similar
scenes in Kabul after the Afghan war—that people the world over do not like to
be oppressed. No culture or religion makes them content to forgo their basic
rights. But wanting democracy and achieving it are two different things. Over
the past decade, the developing world has been littered with examples of quick
transitions to democracy that have gone badly awry. The countries of Central
Europe—a longstanding part of the Western world—have been the exceptions to this
dismal pattern. The awkward truth is that whisky and sex have proved much easier
to export than constitutional government.
ELECTIONS
AND DEMOCRACY
We could, of course, hold elections in Iraq, hand over power and go
home. But elections do not produce democracy. Consider Russia, where Vladimir
Putin was elected but rules like an autocrat. He has forced his political
opponents out of office, weakened other branches of government and intimidated
the once free media into near-total silence. And he’s one of the success
stories. In Venezuela, the elected demagogue Hugo Chavez has turned himself into
a dictator, running his rich country into the ground. Eighty percent of
Venezuelans now live below the poverty line. In Africa, 42 of the continent’s 48
countries have held elections in the last decade, but almost none of them have
produced genuine democracy.
What is called democracy in the West is really liberal democracy,
a political system marked not only by free elections but also the rule of law,
the separation of powers and basic human rights, including private property,
free speech and religious tolerance. In the West, this tradition of liberty and
law developed over centuries, long before democracy took hold. It was produced
by a series of forces—the separation of church and state, the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, the Reformation, capitalism and the development of an independent
middle class.
England and the United States were considered free societies 200 years
ago—when under 5 percent of their populations voted. More recently, Hong Kong,
for decades ruled as a “crown colony” by Britain, was one of the most
economically and politically free societies in the world. Today democracy and
liberty are intertwined in the Western political fabric, so we can’t imagine
them as separate. But around much of the developing world they are coming apart.
Democracy is flourishing, liberty is not.
WHERE DEMOCRACY FLOWERS
It’s not that liberal democracy cannot spread outside the West. It has,
and in far-flung places. But it is instructive to see where and why. Over the
last decade those countries that moved farthest toward liberal democracy
followed a version of the Western pattern: first capitalism and the rule of law,
then democracy. In much of East Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia—a
dominant ruling elite liberalized the economy and the legal system. Capitalism
created a middle class that then pressured the government to open up the
political system. It nurtured an independent civil society that has helped
consolidate democracy. In Latin America, the most successful liberal democracy
today is Chile, which followed a similar path under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. These
dictators were not trying to create democracy. But in modernizing their
countries they ended up doing so anyway.
Washington officials often say that American democracy is not
necessarily the model for Iraq. Perhaps, but the central philosophy behind the
American Constitution, a fear of concentrated power, is as relevant today as it
was in 1789. “In framing a government,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No.
51, “you must first enable —the government to control the governed; and in the
next place oblige it to control itself.” Order, then liberty. In Iraq today,
first establish a stable security environment and create the institutions of
limited government—a constitution with a bill of rights, an independent
judiciary, a sound central bank. Then and only then, move to full-fledged
democracy.
Paddy Ashdown, the British politician who was appointed “czar” of
Bosnia, admits that administrators there got the sequence wrong: “We thought
that democracy was the highest priority, and we measured it by the number of
elections we could organize. The result even years later is that the people of
Bosnia have grown weary of voting. In addition, the focus on elections slowed
our efforts to tackle organized crime and corruption, which have jeopardized
quality of life and scared off foreign investment.” “In hindsight,” he wrote,
“we should have put the establishment of the rule of law first, for everything
else depends on it: a functioning economy, a free and fair political system, the
development of civil society, public confidence in police and the courts.”
A
‘SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGE’
Vice President Dick Cheney recently remarked that Iraq’s oil
resources—the second largest in the world—will be a “significant advantage” when
building democracy. This is a common refrain, echoed by many within and without
the administration. Unfortunately, the opposite is closer to the truth. With the
exception of Norway, virtually all the world’s oil states are dictatorships.
This is not an accident. Oil—like other natural resources—does not help produce
capitalism, civil society and thus democracy. It actually retards that process.
Countries with treasure in their soil don’t need to create the framework
of laws and policies that produce economic growth and create a middle class.
They simply drill into the ground for black gold. These “trust-fund states”
don’t work for their wealth and thus don’t modernize—economically or
politically. After all, easy money means a government doesn’t need to tax its
people. That might sound like a good idea, but when a government takes money
from its people, the people demand something in return. Like honesty,
accountability, transparency—and eventually democracy.
This bargain, between taxation and representation, is at the heart of
Western liberty. After all, that is why America broke away from Britain. It was
being taxed but not represented in the British Parliament. The Saudi royal
family offers its subjects a very different bargain: “We don’t ask much of you
[in the form of taxes] and we don’t give you much [in the form of liberty].”
It’s the inverse of the slogan that launched the American Revolution—no taxation
without representation.
THE CURSE OF OIL
Far from limiting state power, oil actually strengthens it. There is
always enough money for the army, the intelligence services and the secret
police. Saudi Arabia, for example, spends 13 percent of its annual GDP on the
military, four times America’s level. Oil also means that corruption infects
every aspect of the society. Businessmen are valued not for what ideas they have
or how hard they work, but for who they know. Oil states have a courtier
culture, not a commercial culture.
No Iraqi will read this analysis and come to the conclusion that the
country should seal up its oil wells and forswear its natural resources—nor
should he. But it is worth asking how best to limit the damaging political and
economic effects of oil wealth. It is not an impossible task. After all, some
trust-fund kids turn out well.
The key is to take the wealth out of the arbitrary control of the state.
This could mean privatizing the oil industry. But in Iraq, the oil is largely in
the Shiite, Kurdish and Turkoman areas, which could trigger ethnic conflict (as
happened in Nigeria). Privatization would also probably enrich a few
well-connected Iraqis and create corrupt oligarchs, as happened in Russia. So it
might also be worth looking at the structure of the few well-run state petroleum
companies—Malaysia’s Petronas, for example—as models.
But perhaps the best approach is to create a national trust—with transparent and internationally monitored accounting—into which all oil revenues flow. These revenues could be spent only in specified ways: on, for example, health care and education. The World Bank has been experimenting on such a model with Chad, the tiny oil-rich African state. Alaska is another successful version of this model. Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation points out that Alaska distributes its oil revenues directly to its residents, bypassing the corruption usually created by leaving it in the hands of governments or oligarchs. This is a variation of land reform, redistributing wealth broadly, which was crucial in spurring democracy in Japan and almost all other feudal societies.
The second great obstacle to Iraqi democracy is also one of its great
strengths—its ethnic and religious diversity. The two dramatic and successful
transitions to democracy in recent memory are
Germany and Japan, which became reasonably mature democracies
within a decade of World War II. Both were advanced, industrializing countries,
but more important, both were ethnically homogenous. Iraq is riven with ethnic
and religious differences. Its 25 million people are made up of Kurds (15 to 20
percent), Sunni Arabs (15 to 20 percent), Shiite Arabs (60 percent), plus
Turkomans, Assyrians and other Christians.
TRIBAL LOYALTIES
Meanwhile religious, tribal and ethnic divisions have been growing
sharper in Iraq in recent years. For much of the past half century, Iraqis saw
themselves as Iraqis first and then Shiites or Sunnis. The Baath Party, with its
socialist leanings, downplayed religion, tribe and ethnicity, teaching that
these were signs of backwardness. But over the past 10 years, Saddam Hussein has
encouraged religious and tribal loyalties. Saddam, the secular leader, became
Saddam, the builder of mosques and the convener of tribal gatherings. Dancing at
these events, he would shoot a rifle in the air in true tribal spirit.
In part,
this was Saddam’s crude attempt to gain legitimacy. But it also reflects a
general rise of identity politics in the Arab world. The failure of regimes like
Saddam’s—originally Western styled, socialist, secular—has led people to see
Islam as their salvation and to seek comfort in their tribal and ethnic
backgrounds. Young democracies have a very poor record of handling ethnic and
religious conflict. The most dramatic example is, of course, the former
Yugoslavia, where the end of communism opened up a raw contest for power. Early
elections fueled the rise of Serbian and Croatian nationalism, and a subsequent
orgy of ethnic cleansing and war. During the 1990s, many observers watched what
was happening in the Balkans with puzzlement. Weren’t the forces of democracy
also the forces of ethnic harmony and tolerance? Actually, no.
Elections require that politicians compete for votes. In societies
without strong traditions of tolerance and multiethnic groups, the easiest way
to get support is by appealing to people’s most basic affiliations—racial,
religious, ethnic. Once one group wins, it usually excludes the other from
power. The opposition becomes extreme, sometimes violent. This does not have to
happen, but it often does. Even in India, a reasonably mature democracy, Hindu
fundamentalists have pursued an extreme form of nationalism that terrorizes the
country’s Muslim minority—and greatly appeals to hard-core Hindu voters. Last
year in Gujarat, a regional government run by the fundamentalists allowed the
police to assist in the massacre and ethnic cleansing of thousands of Muslims.
The result: the ruling party won a resounding victory in the polls.
‘WINNER TAKE ALL’ IS A LOSER
Diversity, properly handled, can be a great source of strength in Iraq.
But power will have to be divided, shared and checked. The constitution of a new
Iraq should create a federal state, with substantial local autonomy. The regions
should not be all ethnically or religiously based. The electoral system should
not create a “winner take all” system, in which a party that wins 51 percent of
the vote gets all the political power. Let the losers share in the spoils. Have
both a head of state (a president) and a head of government (a prime minister),
another way to give some representation to various communities. So a Shiite
prime minister could govern while a Kurdish president would be the titular head
of state.
While all these processes are underway, while democracy is being built
in Iraq, someone is going to have to govern the country. In the short term, that
will inevitably be the United States of America.
There is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that
they be governed,” the columnist Walter Lippmann once observed, “self-governed
if possible, well governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed.”
In Iraq, only the American and British forces can govern in the short term.
Washington has announced that it intends to form, at the earliest possible date,
an Interim Iraqi Authority. It’s an important step to include Iraqis as early as
possible in the new regime. If all goes well, the Bush administration seems to
believe that it can very quickly rebuild Iraqi infrastructure, get basic
services operating and transfer power to this authority. Within months, perhaps
a year, America will hand over power to the Iraqis, demonstrating that this is
truly a liberation, not an occupation.
This
scenario, however, is unlikely to play out. Virtually everywhere the United
States has intervened—Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan—military forces have had to
stay far longer than anyone expected. In Afghanistan, the administration thought
it could establish order quickly and cheaply. It has had to reverse
course—perhaps too late. It will have to do the same in Iraq.
POWER STRUGGLES
First there is the need for law and order. But there is also the reality
of power struggles. As leaders emerge and are selected, others will be excluded.
They may not accept this fate quietly. As the rivalries, feuds, score-settling
and political jostling begins, the country will stay peaceful only if an
undisputed authority keeps the peace. Little noticed in recent years, the Kurds
have created some genuine democracy in the north, but the region was sheltered
by American air power.
The next few years are crucial, because it is during this same period
that a constitution must be written, power sharing must begin, courts must be
established and important policy decisions about oil and rebuilding must be
taken. The United States will have to get involved in these decisions to ensure
that they are not hijacked by one group or another in Iraq. Until a legitimate
Iraqi government has been formed—until national elections—the United States will
play the role of honest broker among the various factions.
And yet this is going to be called colonialism. The Iraqis who feel
excluded from the new regime will level that charge instantly. Others in the
Arab world who are threatened by the changes in Iraq will want Iraq to slip back
into “normalcy”—which is to say dictatorship. The Saudi foreign minister called
last week for an end to the “occupation” of Iraq—before Baghdad had even fallen
into American hands. This then is the paradox: to build democracy in Iraq the
United States must stay on, but to demonstrate that it is not a colonial power
it must leave.
WHO’S IN CHARGE?
The solution lies in involving other countries in this process. To the
extent that the United States can make the assistance to Iraq multilateral, all
the better. Of course, someone has to be in charge, and that will be the United
States. But Washington should make every effort to have the United Nations bless
this process, to get the European Union and Japan to help fund and administer
it, and to get the Coalition forces to be involved as peacekeepers. This will
take some of the economic and military burden off the United States, a burden
that is likely to be larger and longer than anyone currently estimates. In the
eyes of Iraqis, the involvement of outsiders will be seen as international
assistance, not American occupation.
There are
many models of transitional government. The United Nations runs Kosovo, but
Bosnia is governed through a specially created multilateral body. The goal is
not to empower any one international organization but to create
legitimacy—legitimacy for the outside forces but also for the participating
Iraqis. One of the dangers of an exclusively American occupation is that the
Interim Iraqi Authority will be seen as an American puppet. The greatest
modernizer of the Middle East, Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, was able to revolutionize
his country in large part because he had unimpeachable credentials as a
nationalist. He fought the Western powers even while he Westernized his country.
It is impossible to know who will rule Iraq, but no one can doubt that it will
be someone who can appeal to Iraqi nationalism.
For America, the stakes in Iraq are very high. If Iraq becomes a
successful, modern, liberal country, it will have ripple effects throughout the
Middle East. Just as the success of Japan inspired other Asian countries to
develop, so Iraq might unsettle the stagnant order of the Middle East. It will
not solve all the problems of the region. (The road to Jerusalem runs through
Palestine and Israel, not Baghdad.) But it will address the most crucial one—the
region’s political dysfunction.
In a broader sense, how America handles Iraq will have a bearing on how
the world perceives the United States. If we use this moment of victory and
power to reach out and include others, it will demonstrate that we have not just
great power but also generosity of spirit. Naturally, those who supported the
military intervention should be given special attention. But a place can be
found even for those who didn’t (with the possible exception of Mr. Chirac’s
government. Even multilateralism has its limits).
The challenge is not as arduous as it might seem. We are not really
nation-building in Iraq. Iraq is already a nation. It is not even a failed
state. It is a failed political system, which needs to be transformed. In doing
so, America and others in the international community can help. But ultimately
it is Iraqis who will build a new Iraq. The single most important strength a
society can have is a committed, reformist elite. That has been at the heart of
the success of Central Europe, weathering through all its ups and downs. When
Michael Camdessus, former head of the IMF, is asked why Botswana, a diamond-rich
African country, has done well, while most diamond states have not, his answer
is, “Three words: three honest men.” Botswana has had three honest and competent
presidents.
There is no magic formula to create such statesmen, but Iraq has a
significant advantage—the memory of Saddam Hussein. Just as the backdrop of
communism spurred Central Europeans to reform, so Iraq’s long nightmare might
well make its leaders determined to break with the past. National trials,
memoirs, truth and reconciliation commissions, oral histories—all will help
maintain and recover that memory. No matter what problems they face, most Iraqis
will surely try hard to ensure that their country never again enters the abyss
it has been in for three decades.