[Mb-civic] RECOMMENDED: Iraq's insecure democracy - H.D.S. Greenway - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Iraq's insecure democracy

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  March 7, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

MUCH OF the Bush administration's hopes for Iraq, and the transformative 
powers of democracy in the Middle East, lie in the ruins of the Askariya 
mosque's golden dome in the city of Samarra. For the bombing of the 
mosque exposed clearly what America wants so much to deny: that in the 
present climate of lawlessness there are ethnic and religious tensions 
in Iraq that are simply not going to allow for the kind of democracy the 
administration naively envisioned.

A degree of hypocrisy was also exposed after elections in both Iraq and 
the West Bank and Gaza. Despite the president's rhetoric about freedom 
on the march, the first thing the Bush administration did after Hamas 
won its victory was to search about for ways to undermine the will of 
the Palestinian people as expressed in a free and fair election. Plots 
were reportedly hatched with Israel to make life so miserable for the 
Palestinians that they would go back to the polls in another election 
and throw the recently victorious Hamas out. Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice got on her plane and flew off to drum up support for 
denying the Palestinians money.

Both tactics are extremely short-sighted, for the Palestinians have 
shown time and time again that they put their pride and their national 
aspirations ahead of their comfort. If this policy is continued, the 
United States will lose its leverage to help shape events in the West 
Bank and Gaza, relinquishing the field to Iran and the more radical 
elements in the Sunni Arab world. And then Hamas will be even further 
away from recognizing Israel or forswearing violence.

The old Israeli adage that ''the Palestinians must be made to understand 
in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated 
people," as an Israeli army chief of staff once expressed it, has never 
worked and isn't going to work now.

And no sooner did the Iraqis make their choices in an acceptably fair 
election than the Americans started to tell them what America wanted in 
the way of an Iraqi government. America's capable and hard-working 
ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, was not wrong in stressing that a 
government of national unity was the best way for Iraq to proceed, but 
to go public with the impotent threat that the United States would 
withdraw its support of the new Iraqi government if it didn't accede to 
America's wishes was simply a crude exercise in imperial manipulation 
and humiliation that, in the end, will do more harm than good. Even if 
he gets his way, Khalilzad's tantrum will simply de-legitimize the 
results in the eyes of the Iraqi people as the work of American puppets.

Khalilzad is not wrong in his assessment that sectarian militias will 
lead to ''warlordism," but the chance to talk the Iraqis out of 
maintaining militias went by the board with Donald Rumsfeld's 
catastrophic failure to secure the country after the US invasion. For 
the classic pattern when a state falls apart, and when people lack 
security, is for them to fall back and rely upon what political 
psychologists call the ''survival group."

It is well known that when a group feels threatened it defines itself in 
the narrowest of terms to distinguish friend from foe. It is only when 
the group feels less threatened that it can reach out to others to form 
a broader definition of national purpose.

American ambassadors can threaten the Iraqis all they want, but without 
security Iraqis are simply not going to give up the means of protecting 
their particular survival group, their militias. And a broader 
definition of national purpose won't be possible as long as there is no 
security. Nothing could have made that point more strongly than the 
aftermath of the golden dome bombing.

I remember the late Harvard psychologist John Mack telling me that the 
psychological functions served by identification with a survival group 
''are common to all conflicts; survival and a sense of self-worth. These 
are all fundamental psychological principles, a sense of having power 
versus powerlessness."

''At bottom, our survival group . . . defines our sense of self. Any 
political thinker who seeks a fellowship of mankind must recognize the 
psychological meaning of the identity of self. Failure to do so will 
limit such concepts as brotherhood of man to philosophical and utopian 
visions and imaginings."

And I am sorry to say that it is precisely the ''utopian visions and 
imaginings" of the Bush administration that got us into this disaster in 
the first place.


http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/07/iraqs_insecure_democracy/
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