Iraq Election Fun has Just Begun
The Iraqi ethnoreligious landscape: three nations for the price of one
Another completed election in the third world, another round of fraud charges. Of course, it was almost guaranteed that whoever lost the recent elections in Iraq would allege fraud—regardless of the truth or falsity of the claim. That’s just how “democracy” works in these kinds of places. The cloud of “fraud” will continue to hang over Iraq in the coming days and weeks, and it will add another valuable ingredient to the instability soup, along with religious fundamentalism, terrorism, corruption, anti-Americanism, poverty… you get the idea. Reuters recently reported on Iyad Allawi and Nuri al-Maliki in the context of the political situation:
Allawi, a secular Shi’ite who served as prime minister in 2004-05 after the U.S. invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein, and his Iraqiya partners took 91 seats in parliament to 89 for Maliki’s State of Law coalition in a vote that exposed the depth of Iraq’s sectarian divide.
Violence erupted when Iraq’s political leaders took five months to form a government after the last parliamentary vote in 2005. Allawi appeared to try to allay fears of a repeat…
Officials with Maliki’s coalition and from the third-place finisher, the Iraqi National Alliance, a bloc with close relationships with Shi’ite neighbor Iran, have said they are working toward a merger. The two combined would hold 159 seats, close to the majority needed to form a government.
INA includes the Sadrist political movement of anti-American Shi’ite Moqtada al-Sadr, who is studying in Iran and is shaping up to be the new kingmaker of Iraqi politics…
any attempt by the major Shi’ite blocs to sideline Allawi could lead to resentment among Sunnis pushed to the side when the majority Shi’ites rose to power following the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Iraq is in trouble and has been for a while, for the same reason as Afghanistan: extensive heterogeneity in identity among the people belies the authority of a unitary central government. In other words, a state from multiple nations won’t work. In western terms, the analogy is a single state and a single central government trying to be formed to encompass Italy, Germany and France. Now, there are certainly very different circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq culturally, socially and economically. But the essential characteristics of identity and the challenges to nation-state stability are identical.
There is a very simple test that can be used to determine the stability of a government: do the people over which that government has authority identify with each other, or not? If they do, then, despite all other problems, that government has a reasonable chance at success. If they do not, then there is no chance, because the most fundamental aspect of a nation-state (the nation) is not there. Sooner or later, it will probably fail. It is vital to understand that this is not because of short term violence, it is not because of the vicissitudes of day-to-day parliamentary politics, or because of an economic downturn (which are probably what the press will blame it on if and when the Iraqi state does fail). It is a structural feature of the society in question that guarantees state failure.
Saddam Hussein ensured internal stability in Iraq for over 20 years through blood-soaked tyranny. It was ruthless dictatorship alone that was able to keep a lid on the bubbling stew of ethnic, tribal and religious tension. That bubbling stew, naturally, boiled over in the aftermath of Hussein’s overthrow. For years, hundreds of Americans and many thousands of Iraqis died during the botched Bush nation-building project. Then, in the last few years, a surge in American troops ensured some temporary stability that has allowed some democratic progress to be made.
Rest assured that this stability is indeed temporary. As Obama winds down the troop presence in the coming months, we can expect that Iraq will once again regress back into a quagmire of ethnic, tribal and sectarian violence. But it is not, as the Republicans and conservatives will undoubtedly argue, because of the decrease in troops. It will be ultimately due to the inherent structural attributes of Iraqi society spelled out above. In time, unless identity is overhauled in Iraq, and average Iraqis really start to see themselves as Iraqis first and Sunni Arabs or Shiite Arabs or Kurds second, it is inevitable that the current state model will fail.
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