The Coalition Provisional Authority has one heck of a problem on its hands in Iraq. This is not to do with the military costs of putting down the insurgency there — though heaven knows that after ten months of conflict, with the US death toll reaching 500 last Saturday, these costs are far from insignificant.
Rather it has to do with the predicament of promoting liberty and prosperity in a country that for decades had enjoyed neither, via a brand new political system alien to, but not by any means detrimental to the interests of, most Iraqis.
A row erupted late last week when tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites demonstrated in Basra and other cities around the country against a US plan to put an unelected, temporary government in power by July 1. Under the Bush administration’s plan for political transition in the country, approved by the US-appointed Governing Council more than two months ago, caucuses would be held to choose representatives to a transitional assembly, which in turn would choose a provisional government that the CPA would hand national authority to by July 1.
The Shiites’ highest-ranking cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has said repeatedly that “direct elections” are the only acceptable means for selecting members of this assembly.
Reportedly, the US is baffled over exactly what Sistani wants, unsure whether he and other Shiite leaders in fact understand the US plan of 18 regional caucuses held to select the national assembly. The Arabic language, along with its political vocabulary, has developed no precisely equivalent expression.
With the plan potentially about to unravel, the coalition authority hastened to translate that as “election by conference.” The concept of caucus, a closed meeting where politicians from the same party get together to select candidates, or to decide policy, is clear to the average American with any serious claim to political literacy, but to the average Iraqi it doesn’t ring a bell, nor does the idea that time should be allowed for a census to be taken and voting rolls to be prepared before a full-fledged election is conducted.
Sistani offered no alternative formula, insisting on his demand for immediate elections. And Paul Bremer, the US governor in Iraq, wary that the majority Shiites may use their power to move toward a council of clerics wielding an effective veto, similar to that in neighboring Iran, struggled to come up with adjustments to the US proposal.
Meanwhile, in the north, Kurdish leaders have signaled that they would not sign on to the plan for a transitional government either, unless Kurds were guaranteed full autonomy in a region expanded beyond the one they have controlled since 1991 — that would include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk — and an iron-clad commitment to expel Arabs settled in the area under Saddam’s regime.
Not only do the Kurds here face significant opposition to these ambitions by the US, which has indicated that Kirkuk not be part of Kurdish territory, but also by Arab members of the Governing Council; and Syria, Turkey and Iran vehemently oppose such dramatic shifts in Iraq’s territorial and political composition. And in the so-called Sunni Triangle, Iraqis are disenchanted with the idea that their interests are being represented by US-handpicked “exiles” who had lived outside Iraq for decades but now advance themselves as national figures in tune with the aspirations of everyday Iraqis.
Oh, the burdens of a big power! A big power that, starting from scratch, is beginning to realize that rebuilding Iraq is not the cakewalk that rebuilding Germany and Japan had been — two homogeneous societies that, unlike Iraq, had had rigorously well-structured polities in the first place, and all America had to do there was to shift and reorganize those already existing polities.
That is why L. Paul Bremer, bless his well-meaning soul, headed to the United Nations last Monday — after a year of tension between the US and the world body — to try to build a partnership with it to help solve the dispute over the selection of the new Iraqi government.
Well, duh! Didn’t we all suggest that from day one as Washington, opting then for a cavalier dismissal of its allies abroad, went about its unilateralist way?
