This article explains my thoughts closely. It is rather long but a good read. I am adding the small portion of it that perhaps answers your question.
ST
brookings.org
Finally, the issue of democracy. Clearly one reason why people in the region were suspicious about the American intent to bring about democracy was that they were witnessing, just as we were talking about democracy, increased suppression in the Arab countries, in part because we're asking governments to do things that were unpopular and to go against the public opinions and governments were in essence doing what we wanted them to do but only by employing their security services to be more repressive. So they were experiencing more repression in this conflict and probably will continue to do so in the foreseeable future because of the increasing gap that came out of this war between the governments and the public. The governments in the short term have no means of addressing that except by being more repressive. That's one fear.
But the Iraq issue, looking at the Iraq issue and what might come out of Iraq, they may certainly come to the conclusion that the regime of Saddam Hussein has been the most brutal and anything will be better. But they are also frightened by the divisions that they see already existing, and they're also frightened by what the U.S. may or may not allow to take place, whether or not the government is going to be seen to be imposed from the outside or not. We have already seen the complexity of the issue in Iraq.
Most experts who look at the Iraq issue understood that fighting the war was the easy part of it. The difficult part was when the war ends and you try to win the peace. Everybody understood that going in. It has started, and one reason about the concerns for "democracy" in Iraq was the reality on the ground. Not only the factionalism that we have been experiencing and watching within each community. Sunis are not unified, Shias are not unified, Kurds are not unified, let alone across communal lines. That's become obvious from day one of this issue.
The second layer of problem is that when you look at Iraq, even beyond the fact that it has never had a real democracy, but when you look at what has happened in the past 35 years, essentially every institution, every organization, political organization, has been destroyed in order to monopolize politics through the Ba'th party. Civil society has certainly not taken root except for those that are related to the center of power. The middle class has all but disappeared in the past dozen years.
So what you have in Iraq now is, in terms of organizational capacity, is largely religious organizations, and the fact that you have over a million Shias going yesterday to Karbala is not surprising. But the reality of it in the short term is you're going to have an election, whether it's going to be this year or next year, any time soon, most likely the people who are going to be able to mobilize the largest numbers are going to be the clergy, and many of them clearly want themselves to play a bigger role in politics.
How do you create an environment where you have true competitors for the clergy? Where you build institutions that can mobilize people to come to the voting station? That is going to be a trick that is I think almost insurmountable in the foreseeable future if by democracy we mean a truly free electoral democracy. Because if we have a fully free election at any time soon, the outcome is not going to be what Washington will interpret to be a favorable outcome. |
