For those of you interested in the emails I get from THE MAN ON THE SCENE in Iraq, here is another email as to recent developments. jdn
Edward McDonnell III <nedmcd@yahoo.com> wrote:
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 02:33:47 -0800 (PST)
From: Edward McDonnell III
<nedmcd@yahoo.com>Subject: Week 28; post votum impression
To: AuntMarion <marionmcd@sbcglobal.net>,
Baltimoriole <jpurnell@verizon.net>, Clairey-bug <cpgd@verizon.net>,
tuckate@hotmail.com
The election euphoria has abated with time. Nothing has dampened the wonder of these elections but the human head carries only so many endorphins. The question on everybody’s mind is what to do about the relatively lower Sunni turn-out. This issue is a delicate one since Ayatollah Sistani, the Shi’ite religious leader, remained unwavering about – and ultimately prevailed in – Iraq’s conducting a one-person / one-vote election.
To give the Sunni Arabs representation proportionate to their percentage of the overall population as opposed to percentage of seat won in the election could alienate the Shi’ite majority and its leadership. On the other hand, to remain true to the one-person / one-vote principle may leave Sunni Arabs virtually without any representation in the drafting of the constitution. That outcome could easily play into the hands of the Sunni insurgents.
The State Department is working hard behind the scenes, though I am not sure how much energy is required to temporize in the hope of the problem simply going away.
The interesting item to note is that the U.S. approach of “let’s sit down and reason together” from 1787 may have worked well two hundred, eighteen years later in Iraq. This approach of each governorate (in Iraq’s case; equivalent to each state or province) sending to Baghdad a delegation selected from the local population would have worked smartly. Unfortunately, the U.N. is probably right in its over-ride of this method due to time constraints, not to mention Sistani’s fence-sitting while evincing a most un-Islamic poker face.
I am guessing that a special deal will be cut for the Sunnis since the down-side (i.e., possible civil war) is sufficiently grave for all parties to warrant a special compromise. Additionally, Sunni voters relative to the greater danger they faced turned out as courageously as the rest of the nation. In any case, I remain convinced – as I have for more than two years – that Iraq’s first big challenge is not growing into democracy but fostering republicanism’s necessary pre-condition: pluralism.
Loosely, for me at least, pluralism – among the Sunni Arabs (Sunnis), Kurds and Shi’ites – entails each demographic group giving up its dream of having it all (i.e., unfettered access to oil-tapped riches) at the expense of the other two groups in exchange for peace, security and, eventually, dispersed prosperity if not concentrated wealth. For each of the three groups, that translates into…
the Kurds giving up their singular claim to the large amount of the proven oil reserves embedded in their land.
the Sunnis giving up any hope of the return of the “bad old days” of maddaS.
the Shi’ites letting go of a desire for revenge for generations of oppression, dating back to the Ottoman Empire, at the hands of Sunnis whom they have always out-numbered.
In the e-mail that follows, I will forward along three interesting items:
1. a photo montage displayed in sequence accompanies by Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”.
2. a collection of summaries of articles appearing in various local and regional newspapers and periodicals from recent days.
3. an article about another, less dramatic but equally instructive victory in Yemen for peaceful conflict resolution.
The music selected for the slide-show is especially poignant for those of us who are among the few remaining Johnsonian Democrats. This score was the theme for our party during the great years of the New Deal – capped by those of the Great Society, when voting rights triumphed. I never thought I would see the day where my party – the party of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter – would deride these elections or seek to discount their importance. Who would have thought that Bobby Kennedy’s little brother would be saying such things? One the noose-clips, one ought to remain wary of a selection bias reflected in this assortment.
On the personal side of things, I am preparing for a little break from here to go to Amman to review a Police Academy in Jordan and, hopefully, an industrial trade zone. Then I go to Istanbooty for five days – no, you provincial types, I absolutely refuse to wear an American flag patch on my sleeve and run around yelling, “Aw, heck, never thought Constannnnnnnn-in-ople would be ennithin’ like this…” Losing my wallet for two weeks – long enough to induce me to cancel my credit cards – has made this trip something of an adventure. That is the advantage of being a “fuzzy-headed (perhaps ex-)liberal”: life, no matter how prosaic, is always suspenseful. Per Susan Isquith’s advice, I will try to get to Ephesus…if I get to Turkey.
I have been enjoying some extra-curricular work in looking at the economics of enterprise / trade zones. They have proliferated in this part of the world. Iraq does not have one yet; the first is being planned in Kurd-land; I might get to go to that region later this winter. In these activities, I have also been researching and writing draft papers on economic policies for increasing employment inside Iraq and on how to spur the growth of the country’s nascent private sector – that is to say: what to do to re-develop the middle class.
Most of this stuff, like most policy research in general, ends up in the circular file. I am coming to believe that the “wonk” in ‘policy-wonk’ is an acronym for…
With0ut Needed Kinetics.
This State Department crowd revels in postulating, thinking, writing, talking, talking, talking but not DOING. I call it “management by sitting on the seat of your pants…” A true-baby-blue diplomat's answer to an avalanche? “Get your blah-blahs out!!!” |
