| Monday
April 28, 2003
As usual there was a lot of mail over the weekend, much of
it interesting. And Saturday we scattered Ginny Heinlein's ashes into the
Pacific. She wasn't religious, but she was always convinced that she would
meet Robert again. Let us hope so.
Governing Iraq
It's the standard cliché, "we won the war, now comes the hard
part."
So. What do we do now? How can we build democracy in Iraq? Is there a
chance for success?
Middle Class Rule
Aristotle defines democracy as
rule by the middle class, the middle class being those who possess the
goods of fortune in moderation. There have been a lot of other definitions
of democracy, but that one endures: it has been a characteristic of every
working democracy that lasted long enough to make the history books. The
implications are worth examining.
First, note that nothing has been said about religion, birth, military
ability, family connections, or anything else but property. The ruling
class is defined by an economic condition: and that condition is the possession
of property, not excessive amounts of property but not zero either.
Marx said that history would end only when the proletariat -- those who
had no property -- became rulers and everything was held in common or
owned by the state. He made no distinction between those conditions. The
end result of Marxism has been rule by the nomenklatura, Djilas's
"New Class", everywhere it has been tried, and there is no
reason to suppose it won't work that way every time. When the state is the
sole employer, dissent means starvation, and power comes only from
climbing the political ladder.
Most states that have tried democracy by enfranchising the proletariat
have ended with "one man, one vote, once," after which a strong
man takes charge and ends the electoral process. We then have rule by one
party, such as the Baath, or maybe rule by the bogeymen as they
demonstrated in Haiti. Incidentally, it may not be true that Haiti was as
well off under Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and the Tonton Macout as it is under
the US-imposed thugs, but I haven't seen any evidence contradicting that
proposition. Our nation-building experiments in this hemisphere don't
augur well for what's going to happen in the Middle East.
The task, then, is to empower middle class in Iraq. Can this be done?
Well, on the plus side, Iraq has a middle class. There are people there
who own property, and many are well educated. Most are literate. They're
not all proletarians and thugs. On the other hand, Iraq has never had a
democracy, and the middle class in Iraq has never had any power. Ever.
Empowering people who have never had any experience of governing is a
tricky proposition at best.
Can You Afford To Lose?
The central question in a democracy is, can you afford to lose the
election? If you try and fail, is loss total? Will you be jailed, your
property confiscated, your family jailed or killed? If the consequences of
loss are enormous, then you don't let the ballot box be the final
decision. Nor should you.
The first thing we must do is assure the losers they can afford to
lose, and that we will be there to protect them.
Who Wins?
We all see the complexities. In some parts of Iraq fair elections will
instantly result in the rule of the Mullahs and Ayatollahs and Sheiks.
People will vote for the only leaders they ever knew, and since they have
never had any political leaders or officials who weren't appointed by
Turks, the British, the Monarchy, or a series of dictators, the
notion of electing political leaders and giving them real power isn't
likely to be thought of, much less popular. There's no tradition of self-government
in Iraq. Politics is a career. Of course we're losing that tradition here,
so perhaps Iraq doesn't need it: but then we're beginning to discover that
career politicians really hate it if they lose elections since they don't
have any other career, and that will be doubly true in Iraq. One of the
nice things about self-government by the middle classes is that
politicians can afford to lose elections, and still have something to do
with their lives. Particularly in the early days of this Republic most of
our political leaders couldn't wait to go back home to their farms and law
practices.
The point here is that Iraq has no tradition of self-government, it has
no distinction between political office and civil service, it has no
tradition of standing for office, losing, and going back to work as a tent
maker or leathersmith or shopkeeper, and almost zero instances of having
won a political office, then losing it without losing everything: life,
liberty, property, family. Once you went into politics under the old
regime, you didn't have a lot of other choices. To get any kind of
political job you became a Baathist, and once a Baathist, always a
Baathist. Note that in Syria the current dictator was once an ophthalmologist;
can you imagine him laying down political office and returning to that
life?
What can we do?
If we are serious about building democracy in Iraq, we will have to
stay there for a generation, and we will have to make it clear we are
going to stay there for a generation; and while we are there we are going
to run the country in the sense of running the national government. That
means building and training its armed forces and national judiciary, and
allocating the national revenues, most definitely including oil revenues.
That latter is extremely important.
On the local level, though, we want to turn things over to local
elected people just as soon as possible; and we want to distribute some of
the national revenues to those local governments. We should, in other
words, empower the local governments, give them real power and resources,
and stand guard as the guarantors that the local governments can make
mistakes but they won't be mired in utter corruption and one-party rule
enforced by thugs whether posing as police or not. We guarantee life,
liberty, and property to the participants in the political process, and we
stand ready to enforce those guarantees. There will be no one man, one
vote, once.
We put locals in power and let them run things, including make a lot of
what we call mistakes, and "wasteful" decisions, so long as it's
all done according to law and not simply under the table bribery and
corruption. There's going to be a lot of that, but at least make them be
discrete about it.
And when things begin to work at the local levels, we can start looking
at a federal constitution for a federal state.
The Top Down Option
Going the other way -- trying to have national elections with real
power going to a national parliament -- will be disastrous. There's too
much at stake, and the majorities hate the minorities too much. The
Shi'ites will want an Islamic state, and incidentally to get their own
back from the Sunnis. The Sunni are wealthier than the Shi'ites and will
want to protect what they have. The Baathists are a special case, which
we'll get to in a moment. The Kurds want a Kurdistan and want the oil
revenues to build an army that will help them get it.
There are also the Arab revivalists, who remember that Saladin, a Kurd,
united all the Kurdish and Arabic Muslims to throw out the Latin Kingdom
of Jerusalem and reconquer the whole Middle East, and this only a couple
of generations after Robert of Normandy rode throughout the region begging
anyone of courage to come out and fight him. Saddam Hussein, no Kurd,
still tried to use many of the symbols of Saladin and pose as the coming
Great Liberator of the Arab world. One might suppose that turning Uday
loose on athletes, virgins, and wives as whim dictated wasn't a great way
to win hearts and minds, but perhaps Arabs think different from
Westerners. Then again, Marcus Aurelius was father of Commodus.
Throwing all these elements together and holding a winner take all
national election is a prescription for utter disaster. Surely even the
neo-conservatives know this?
Whose Oil Is This?
If we go the other way, building working local governments in which
there is actually a chance of government through consent of the governed,
and allow that to run long enough that people actually trust the
institutions built, there may be a chance for Iraq as a nation. Perhaps
not: there is a great deal at stake, namely the oil. Switzerland is an
example of a federal government of states that retain real power; the
power remained with the states because at one time the linguistic and
religious differences between the various people in the Helvetian
Confederation were very real indeed, as real as the differences between
Sunni and Shiite, Babylonian and Kurd. But Switzerland had one great
advantage: no oil. Capture of the control of the central government
brought with it no great reward.
Iraq has the opposite problem: control of the central government gives
control of enormous wealth, and even if you spend that money honestly some
will probably stick to your fingers as you pass it along to the people.
What is managing the local water plant or sewage treatment plant compared
to getting control of a few oil wells?
Whose House Is This?
The other problem that even local governments will face is the simple
one of restoring rule of law. Over the past 20 years a number of people
have been displaced: Baathist officials simply came into town and took
over shops, houses, olive groves, of people who weren't Baathists. The
original owners may not have been killed but they were turned out. Some of
them have documentation of their previous ownership and dispossession.
Others have nothing but memories and the hopes that their neighbors will
remember them.
Restoring clear title to property is important. Without it there can be
no rule of law, and without rule of law there can be no democracy. You
can't have rule by the middle class if the middle class has a lot of
people in it who got to be middle class by acts of terror and theft.
(Well, you can, but you have to let a few generations go by, or
exterminate the losers, or both. We don't have a few generations, and
apparently Saddam's Baathists weren't as thorough in eliminating claimants
as they might have been.)
On the other hand, there has to be some finality: claims that your
great grandfather owned this house, but the Brits or the Turks took it
from him, can't be allowed to displace someone who bought the house in
what was a perfectly legal sale. There needs to be an end to litigation.
Settling these matters is more one of local custom than any general
principle common to mankind -- but they have to be settled, and settled
with finality.
There needs to be, in other words, a judiciary system that is
reasonably trusted to hand down decisions seen as fair to the local
inhabitants. One suspects this can't be national, and that the various
Justices of the Peace will vary from one place to another, some being
religious figures, others professionals or even local storekeepers with a
reputation for honesty. But it is essential that local courts that have
the confidence of the local population be set up, and that their decrees
be enforced. Given that, there's a start at rule of law -- and a start at
democracy.
I do not envy the proconsuls whose task is to build that judiciary.
And once again, that isn't going to happen from the top down. As long
as control of the top is in contention, there won't be any real
infrastructure of government built. The best people won't even try to
become Justices of the Peace when there's a chance to be Deputy Assistant
Oil Minister or some such.
But we need those local courts and local governments with real
authority, and offices held by people of real ability. Democracy is in
part a habit: the habit of submitting to a government you consented to.
Those habits have to be built from the ground up; which means the US is
going to be in there for a long time, and controlling the oil revenue and
allocating that money will be its most important task, if only to make it
clear that it's pointless to compete in politics for control of the oil.
If you want to work in Iraqi Oil you get out of politics, and you work for
a salary. We are not going to build a New Class.
Which is to say, if we are going to build democracy, we have no
choice but to be imperial: not in the sense of an emperor, but in the
sense of retaining command. US officials with proconsular power -- with
Imperium -- will be running Iraq at the top for years to come.
Can we stay that course?
In the discussion on Philosophy
of Science last week, the following was said, and it deserves
repeating:
Popper has provided the antidote to
irrationalism but he has been so thoroughly sidelined in academic
philosophy that students can only find out about his ideas by accident,
apart from the garbled and misleading misconceptions of his thoughts that
are perpetuated by his opponents.
It's odd, because Popper was still studied seriously when I was in
graduate school, and most critiques of his view tended to be refinements,
not ways to relegate him to the scrap heap. So it goes...
Also last week was an excellent
letter on where to go for security information. It wasn't indexed and
should have been.
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