The real Iraqi freedom

US must now be just a friendly facilitator

The easy conclusion that some in the United States may draw from the recent elections in Iraq is that George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of that oil-rich country has been justified. The lessons that the country should take away are more complex than that. The fragmented verdict from elections underwritten by American security certainly indicates a healthy emerging plurality that Iraq has lacked for decades. To be sure, the situation is delicately poised among the rival communities for power — Shia, Sunni and Kurds — and the options before the Iraqi people scarcely look appetising right now. The rival contenders for prime ministership are neither popular nor have they stood out as beacons of good governance in the past. Ayad Allawi, a former US-backed Sunni prime minister, has emerged with 91 seats against his rival and incumbent Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki’s Shi-ite coalition with 89 seats in a 325-seat Council of Representatives. That leaves both contenders with the prospect of negotiating for the requisite 163-seat majority with a host of other smaller parties, none of whom are natural allies. Among them are the Iraqi National Alliance partly led by the hard-line Shi-ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr with 70 seats and the nationalist Kurdish party with 43 seats. Much horse-trading is expected — not unlike government-formation in India since the nineties — and the result is by no means certain. Still, the uncertainty of the verdict suggests that rigging has been minimal — though the rivals beg to differ — and, therefore, marks a great leap forward from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party dictatorship, which curbed Shia and Kurdish aspirations brutally enough to create a vicious period of instability after his death.

 

There is no doubt that Iraq is likely to see the kind of political flux that tempts super-power intervention, especially given its continued engagement in that country (troops will exit only in 2013). The US should avoid the understandably strong temptation to influence the outcome. One is the simple lesson of history. If US interventions from Vietnam to Nicaragua and Afghanistan have demonstrated anything it is that, however troublesome, democratic impulses need to work themselves through society and systems to endure. This has been the history of Europe, the US, south-east Asia and, not least, India. Iraq, a rag-tag creation of a post World War I nudge-and-wink agreement between Britain and France after the Turkish empire fell, is no different. Its status as a republic was the result of a military coup against a British-imposed monarchy that brought Saddam Hussein to power. If Saddam endured in his labyrinth for 24 years, it was because he enjoyed staunch US support for at least 20 of them as a counter-balance to a radically anti-American Iran. Without that, it is worth questioning how long he would have stayed in power, whether the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis and 4,300 US soldiers in Operation Iraqi Freedom are worth today’s turmoil or how the cause of greater American security — the ostensible reason for the war — has been served. Playing the role of friendly facilitator, as the US has done under General Odierno, is the best favour the US can do Iraq — and itself.