{"id":423,"date":"2008-10-07T00:15:45","date_gmt":"2008-10-07T04:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/?p=423"},"modified":"2009-06-08T13:45:38","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T17:45:38","slug":"if_only_maliki_were_jefferson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/10\/if_only_maliki_were_jefferson\/","title":{"rendered":"If only Maliki were Jefferson"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Philip Carl Salzman<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter W. Galbraith, in “Is This a ‘Victory’?<\/a>” (in the current issue of The New York Review of Books<\/em>), frets that there is no apparent way to “transform Iraq’s ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish Iran’s vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and Sunnis to Iraq’s new order.” It is apparent to him that the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki is not “a Western-style democrat…, he is a Shiite militant from the hard-line Dawa Party.” He sees the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds each continuing to jockey for position and for maximum control. And in the Iraqi government, politics are in full play, various parties trying to hold or gain power. And Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, where presumably ethnic splits and political maneuvering did not exist, is shocked, shocked.<\/p>\n

Let us leave aside Galbraith’s explicit shilling for the Democrats in the current election and his attempted refutation of the Republican position, although this appears to be much of the motive for the article. Rather, I want to focus on his criteria for assessment and on his analysis of the situation in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Galbraith sets the bar to maximum height, judging according to “Western-style” democracy. Absent Westminster-class democracy, Iraq is a failure. To be a success, Iraq must look like Canada, or at least the Czech Republic. Is Galbraith’s a realistic and practical criterion to apply to Iraq?<\/p>\n

Alternatively, we could consider the changes in Iraq as major steps toward a democratic system. From a personality-cult dictatorship maintained by a brutal secret police and the application of outlawed weapons against the populace, Iraq has been transformed into a parliamentary system with elected representatives. From the reins of power totally held by a minority ethnic group, with the great majority of the population marginalized, powerless, and often victimized, Iraq has moved to full enfranchisement of all Iraqis, with the majority Shiites carrying the greatest weight. All of this might not be good enough for Galbraith, but it is a big improvement for Iraqis.<\/p>\n

Galbraith is aghast at the enmity between Shiites and Sunnis, and Arabs and Kurds (and Turkmen, although they remain unnamed in the article). Such conflicts are of course endemic to the region, having developed and been nurtured over thirteen hundred years. The wonder is not, as Galbraith would have us believe, that each group does not love the other as itself, but that attempts at accommodation remain part of the quest for control by each party. It is thus more reasonable to see the glass as half full, rather than broken into shards with the water run out and lost.<\/p>\n

Galbraith points out that the Shia-dominated government sees the Sunni “Awakening Council” militias as “mortal enemies.” Perhaps so, and perhaps, as he says, the government is unwilling to integrate them, as requested by the Americans, into the Iraqi security forces. Is this proof positive of ultimate doom, as Galbraith seems to suggest? One important point is that the government realizes that it cannot deal with the Awakening militias the way it dealt with Sadr’s Mahdi army. It could suppress the Mahdi army militarily because this was a dispute among Shiites. Doing the same with the Awakening militias risked all-out civil war. Of course, the Americans support these militias, which would be a major factor discouraging the government from such a military initiative. The current position of the government is that it will integrate ten percent of the Awakening militia members into the security forces, and find other jobs for the other ninety percent. Will this work to everyone’s satisfaction? We do not know, but it is an attempt at a viable accommodation, and thus a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n

Galbraith sees Shia-dominated Iraq as Iran’s greatest supporter. “Shiite religious parties … are Iran’s closest allies in the Middle East [and] control Iraq’s central government and the country’s oil-rich south.” But Galbraith does not mention that Maliki’s military initiative in Basra defeated and chased out of Iraq military operatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Galbraith is of course correct to emphasize the importance of Shia identity and loyalty. But he should also appreciate that the Shia-Sunni divide is not the only important opposition in the Middle East and in Iraq and Iran. There is no love lost between Arabs and Persians, who have been on-and-off rivals and antagonists throughout history. Nor have Arabs forgotten who were the first Muslims, and in what language the Quran is written. For their part, Persians have not forgotten that they were the established civilization and dominant force before Islam for thousands of years. Today many Persians, if not the theocratic elite, resent the arabization of their culture, going so far as to return to pre-Islamic the greetings of darood<\/em> and bedrood<\/em> in place of salaam<\/em> and khuda hafez.<\/em> Even leaving aside any sense of Iraqi nationalism, it is highly doubtful that the Iraqi Shiites would look with equanimity at Persian domination.<\/p>\n

Americans, both in and out of the administration, have been a bit shocked that the Middle East has turned out to be rather different from Europe and North America. But is it not late in the game for observers such as Galbraith still to be uncritically applying Euro-American criteria to Iraq? It is more useful to apply realistic criteria of progress, by which measures we can take some pride in how far Iraq has come.<\/p>\n

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Philip Carl Salzman Peter W. Galbraith, in “Is This a ‘Victory’?” (in the current issue of The New York Review of Books), frets that there is no apparent way to “transform Iraq’s ruling theocrats into democrats, diminish Iran’s vast influence in Baghdad, or reconcile Kurds and Sunnis to Iraq’s new order.” It is apparent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[401,2515],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq","category-philip-carl-salzman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":811,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423\/revisions\/811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}