The Assyrian Democratic Organization
When Britain ruled Iraq in the 1920s, there were problems, just as now, in bringing all the ethnic and religious groupings in to the political process. At that time it was the Shia Muslims who were left outside – not least because their religious leaders refused to meet face-to-face with Gertrude Bell, the woman who put modern Iraq together. “I’ve been wholly cut off from them because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman, and my tenets don’t permit me to veil,” she wrote. “It would be a tacit admission of inferiority.”
She had little time for the Shia ayatollahs. “They sit in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can’t see through it – nor can they.”
Britain’s solution to sweeping away the dust of antiquity was to call in a foreign king from the Hashemite dynasty, whose family ruled until they were massacred in 1958.
This being a new century, and the Americans being in charge of Iraq now, Washington’s solution is a constitution, modelled on the US document that has for more than 200 years set the powers of the states and the central government.
That constitutional process is now in crisis. Far from being the magic lamp that would legitimise leaders installed by American and British bayonets, the constitution is a source of massive discord. Sunni leaders – whose community lost power when Saddam was deposed – say the latest draft will provoke civil war if the Shia majority and the Kurds force it through. The Kurds – who have enjoyed self-rule under the protection of the US Air Force for more than a decade – are threatening to split Iraq unless their autonomy is enshrined in a federal constitution. Not to be outdone, some Shia factions want autonomy in southern Iraq, giving them control of its oil resources.
The intellectual game that Baghdad now is debating is whether the blood-drenched insurgency and the ethnic cleansing that goes on in parts of the capital and some of the provinces amount to civil war. My colleague Patrick Bishop, writing here on Monday, said Saddam had been replaced by a “multitude of mini-monsters who are even more contemptuous of human life” and called for a clear admission from the Allies that things are going badly wrong.
How should this paper – one of the foremost supporters of the war to remove Saddam – respond to the news from Iraq? What of benefit can be retrieved from these dashed hopes?
It must be acknowledged that the task of drawing up a constitution may prove impossible for the Iraqi politicians. This is a country where oil wealth entrenched dictatorship, where a decade of sanctions spawned criminality at every level of society, and where the dissolution of the army put guns under every bed. With a full-scale insurgency going on, the time is hardly propitious for drawing up a document that can bridge the competing demands of the disparate peoples lumped together by Gertrude Bell.
There is an Alice-in-Wonderland aspect to the whole thing, with politicians whose writ barely extends beyond the fortified Green Zone debating the future of places where the police fear to step outside their barracks.
Constitution-making may have worked in South Africa, but Iraq is altogether harder: the Arab world sees the American invasion as yet another link in the chain of foreign intervention that began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. A federal state, in the eyes of the Arab world, means chopping up Iraq, leaving the Kurds to go their own way and the Shias to join Iran.
With the omens so poor, a case could be argued for abandoning the whole project. If you cannot get a good constitution, why bother? A bad one, which leads to full-on civil war, is worse than none at all. But to abandon the project at this stage would be a massive defeat for the Allies and a great victory to the jihadists.
The mere fact that the politicians are still talking – albeit behind the protection of American guns – is a sign of hope. The insurgents have no clear plan for Iraq; only the negotiations among Iraqi politicians provide a semblance of a plan for the future.
One glimmer of hope comes from the fact that Sunni communities – who boycotted the January elections – are now registering to vote in the scheduled referendum in October. It has to be pointed out that they are mustering electors not to vote Yes to the constitution, but in order to reject the current draft. Though the Sunnis are a minority, the rules of the referendum allow them to do this. Still, it is better that the constitution be overturned democratically than by the bullet. This would be a setback, but not a disaster.
The feeling is growing in the West that it is time to remove troops from Iraq. Foreign troops, it is argued, are the problem, not the solution. The generals, anxiously watching the opinion polls, want nothing more than an excuse to start reducing troop numbers. So why not now? It is undeniable that the casualties are appalling and that every week Iraq produces more and more insurgents trained and bloodied in battle. The anti-war camp argues rightly that these jihadists did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. But they exist now. If they win, they will spread out to fight Arab regimes and no doubt try to bloody America as well.
So many mistakes have been made that success – the installation of a functioning secular democracy – is out of the question. But we owe it to the Iraqis not to hand them over to the new crop of warlords. What we started we must try to finish.
By Alan Philps
