The Outcome in Iraq?

Shiite Faction Ready to Shun Sunday's Election in Iraq
By DEXTER FILKINS
A radical cleric's refusal to endorse the election
foreshadowed a less than overwhelming voter turnout in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/29/international/middleeast/29iraq.html?th

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Long Road to a Vote
By BAKHTIAR DARGALI
Where I grew up in Iraq, elections weren’t an option.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/29/opinion/29dargali.html?th

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One should never make the mistake of committing the genetic fallacy, (i.e. assuming that things with bad beginnings cannot have good endings) particularly with such weighty matters as the fate of the long-suffering Iraqi people.

But such reports as today's in the NY Times do not bode well. There are three factions in Iraq -- one a potentially dominant majority risking imposing on the other two what De Tocqueville denominated "tyranny of the majority" many years ago in his Democracy in America. If the Shiites 'win' the election on Sunday, all hell may break lose as the disgruntled minorities (Kurds 20% in the north and Sunnis 20% in Baghdad and the west) variously proceed to shatter anything resembling a unified democratic civil society.

Tommy Franks (relieved of his military command early on in Iraq) made sense the other day when he suggested that from the get go we should have set in motion a loosely federated Iraqi division into five parts -- Kurds to the north, two Shiites partitions in the south, Sunnis to the north west, and a fifth centered in Baghdad. Such could have chosen a weak central government to represent the five in the international sphere. Fallujah would now be intact and not delenda est.

It seems that our neocon-driven Bush administration learned nothing from the post WW2 de-colonization -- Nigeria to become a model democracy with parliamentary rule staggered through a series of brutal and corrupt juntas in collusion with our oil corporations. Uganda under Idi Amin was a nightmare until rescued by the wily Museveni who came out the the wilderness to draw together the 12 tribal factions there to establish a civil society ready to hold elections that would not slide into winner-take-all cabals, as has happened with so many former brutally torn up colonies. India ---> violent break away Pakistan (still ruled by a junta) --> the spin-off Bangladesh, which is now more or less a basket case place to subsist.

I wish the Iraqis well, but we have pretty well destroyed their infrastructure. The Bush administration offers them death squads and mushy platitudes and most likely all hell will now break loose and tear the fabric of things even more apart than before we assaulted them. I will be teaching my students' shortly H.L.A. Hart's insight that people obey the law -- not because they fear punishment, but rather because for whatever reason they feel they have an obligation to do so. I do not see such emerging readily in the Iraq of the today.

I hope not, but common sense does not suggest good things there in the near future. May Iraqis have a better day sometime down the line, despite our U.S. depredations there.