Iraq’s new leadership has just two more days to meet a deadline it has set for itself to complete the draft of a new democratic constitution for the recently liberated nation. For the past several months there has been much speculation, not all of it disinterested, that the deadline would not be met and that catastrophe would follow.
This is not the first time that those who still regret the fall of Saddam Hussein are using a deadline as a peg for their hopes that liberated Iraq will go down the chute only to prove that they were right and George W. Bush and Tony Blair wrong.
My guess, however, is that Iraq will meet this latest deadline just as it has met all other deadlines it has set for itself during the past two years. The transfer of sovereignty happened on the promised date and the nation’s first-ever free elections were held on the day circled in the calendar. Almost three years of terrorist insurgency of the kind unprecedented for its savagery have failed to derail the political process in Iraq. The Iraqis want a pluralist democratic system and are determined to get it. The major democracies that coalesced to give the Iraqis a chance must continue their support for at least another year or two.
What is happening in Iraq is not important only in shaping the future of a nation that, despite owning the second, largest oil reserves in the world, is not the biggest strategic prize in the region. Iraq is important because of the impact its political evolution could have on the entire Middle East.
The arrival of the US-led coalition forces in Baghdad in April 2003 represented the third East-West shock taking place in the heart of the Middle East.
The first came in 1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded a moribund Egypt.
The French invaders brought with them the ideas of their revolution, especially the concepts of statehood and modernity. Those ideas found resonance in Islam and helped foster the political reform movement symbolized by Jamaleddin Afghani, a Persian activist who told Muslims that they needed to create “strong states” to resist the advance of Christendom. Over the two centuries that followed most Muslim nations did create powerful states. The trouble was that those powerful states soon turned into enemies of their own people and, on occasions, acted as agents of the very Western powers they were supposed to keep out.
The second shock came when virtually the whole of the Arab world was conquered by the European colonial powers, as most potently symbolized in 1918 by the entry into Baghdad of a British Indian Army. This time, nationalism was the big idea coming out of the shock. Egypt and the Levant witnessed the birth and rapid growth of the pan-Arab movement symbolized by such iconic figures as Sati Al-Husri, Zaki Arsuzi and Gamal Abdul Nasser. In Turkey the banner of nationalism was raised by Mustafa Kemal. In Iran Reza Shah played a similar role for Persian nationalism.
But this time, too, the net result was the emergence of despotic regimes nurtured on secular myths and sustained by military elites.
The liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003, however, amount to a shock of a different type. This time the Western powers who invaded did not come to preach the cult of the strong state or the myth of nationhood. Instead they offered a democratic discourse which, regardless of whether or not it was sincere — and in politics sincerity counts for little — has already altered the terms of the debate in the region. In Tehran the mullas now talk more of democracy than of the “hidden imam”. In Egypt the generals are lining up behind President Hosni Mubarak to promise “step-by-step democratization.” Throughout the Muslim world today the political debate is dominated by the very issues discussed by the Iraqis in connection with their new constitution — issues such as popular legitimacy, elections, power-sharing, the relationship between faith and politics, and the rights of citizens.
Each of the three shocks administered by Western military intervention in the Middle East helped a different local movement. The first shock strengthened the reformist elites within the Muslim clergy and its peripheries. The second was a boon to the military elites and their allies. The third boosts the chances of urban middle classes in pursuit of democratic goals.
In that context Iraq has become the litmus test of the success of the new democratic experience in the Middle East. There is no guarantee that the Iraq project will succeed. But it is vital for everyone concerned that it does.
The continued terrorist campaign in Iraq and the fact that many in the West want Iraq to fail so that they can get at Bush and Blair, have occulted the immense successes achieved in the past three years in the newly liberated nation. The most important of these is the destruction of the physical edifice of despotism followed by the slow but steady crumbling of its intellectual and moral infrastructure. This latter process may take generations before it is completed. But there is no doubt that the Iraqis are psychologically and culturally moving away from despotism rather than toward it as they had done for more than half a century.
Iraq’s economic performance has also been impressive. According to Word Bank reports, Iraq enjoys an annual economic growth rate of 17 percent, the highest in the Muslim world. While part of this is certainly due to skyrocketing oil prices there is no doubt that the emergence of tens of thousands of small and medium businesses has also helped inject life into Iraq’s moribund economy. As a result, unemployment has been cut in half while the value of the new Iraqi dinar has risen by almost 15 percent against the Kuwaiti dinar and the Iranian rial, the two most sought-after foreign currencies in Iraq. Income per head per annum which was estimated at $750 in the final years of Saddam Hussein is estimated to reach the $1100 level later this year.
Iraq today also has a higher proportion of its children at school than any other major Arab country while the farming sector, devastated under Saddam Hussein, is beginning to revive on a spectacular scale. That the Iraqis have confidence in their future is further underlined by the fact that for the first time in half a century more Iraqis, factoring in the real threat of almost daily acts of terror, are returning home than leaving it.
Iraq is the ideal choice for becoming a model for democratic modernization in the Arab world. Its natural and human wealth offer it advantages that most Arab nations could only dream of.
A successful Iraq, one that is prosperous and democratic, would spell the end of all despotic ideologies in the region — from statism to nationalism and passing by Islamism. This is why all reactionary forces in the region have united to prevent Iraq from succeeding. Some of these forces are engaged in a terrorist war that is primarily aimed against the people of Iraq. Others are using their positions of power in some neighboring states to ferry weapons to the terrorists, to conduct propaganda campaigns against the democratic project in Iraq, and to foment dissension within the new political leadership in Baghdad.
Defeating the combined forces of thee vicious and determined enemies is not easy. But, by God, it is a cause worth fighting for.
