The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.
Having said that, it's pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.
Certainly, it is not self-sustaining. What is? Which is not to dismiss the problem. We have defeated the armed threats to Iraq and now we have a non-military mission to accomplish:
A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.
I slightly disagree. Iraq is surely a democracy. They vote for their leaders and the votes seem to be honest without government rigging. What Iraq lacks is rule of law. Those are all the other things that the reporter says--rightly--that Iraq lacks. We associate our voting with rule of law so much that we forget they are separate things. Ultimately, one supports the other, and both are needed in the long run for each to be stable. One problem we face is that the Iraqi government is postponing provincial elections originally due to be held this fall:
The provincial elections that were supposed to take place next month, have been cancelled, and rescheduled for sometime next Summer. Not a good sign. The current elected officials are stealing all they can get away with, and many Iraqis know it, and are eager to vote the thieves out of office. This is particularly true at the provincial level, where the theft is more up close and personal.
This is bad. The people must have confidence that they can kick the bums out with ballots and not bullets if rule of law is to take root and grow. The delay isn't from security concerns. The delay is from the desire to loot a bit more. And perhaps the delay is in the hope that the next American president won't give a damn about Iraqi democracy and will subordinate all to get American troops out of Iraq.
In the short run, I don't worry that the Sunni Arabs will restart their insurgency. Al Qaeda is broken. And we've taken biometric information on the defecting Sunni Arabs, making it difficult for them to slip back into the shadows and fight the Iraqi government.
Unfortunately, rule of law is tougher to engineer than a free election. This is our mission for the next decade in Iraq. We can't just walk away after winning on the battlefield and expect Iraq to advance toward rule of law and what we see as democracy. Iraq might do so. But I wouldn't count on it. We will need to help build Iraq's judiciary, legislature, and executive departments, as well as Iraqi civic society. These are not military objectives and will require our non-military and non-governmental bodies to pitch in.
Will we struggle for this next mission in our haste to get out of Iraq? I hope so.
