An Iraqi election won't guarantee democracy

Iraq's proposed January elec tions are a lose-lose proposi tion.

Fifteen Sunni and two leading Kurdish political parties have asked Iraq's Interim Government to postpone elections now scheduled for Jan. 30, 2005. They claim the continuing violence and insurgency make any vote imperiled if not impossible. That reality was driven home recently when a grenade was tossed into a school with a note warning school administrators not to allow their buildings to be used as polling places. Candidates have been threatened with death, voters have been warned to stay in their homes on Election Day. The Association of Muslim Scholars, Iraq's highest Sunni religious authority, has demanded that all Sunnis boycott the electoral process.

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But the Shiites are adamant that elections proceed as planned. Their supreme religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husayni Sistani, has decreed that voting is not merely an act of citizenship but the highest religious obligation. Shiite mosques are bedecked with voting banners, especially in holy cities such as Najaf and Kufa. Sistani rebuffed recent Sunni-Kurd election delay requests, saying the question was "not even up for discussion." Arab Sunnis and Kurds (together some 40 percent of the population) are now on an electoral collision course with the majority Shiites, who comprise about 60 percent of the country. The dynamics of this election showdown embody the very ethnic torrents that have plagued Iraq for centuries.

Minority Sunnis and majority Shias have massacred and oppressed each other in Iraq since the 7th century, and sometimes did the same for the country's Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jews, Kurds and other minorities. In the last half of the 20th century, the upper hand was seized by Sunni Baathist strongmen, Saddam Hussein being the latest. The concept of one-man one-vote, in which the results will virtually parallel the religious groups, automatically guarantees that the Shiite majority will once again control the nation, settling old scores and disenfranchising everyone else, and laying the groundwork for another civil war.

More than that, free elections - anathema in most of the Middle East - are viewed by the joint domestic and pan-Arab insurgency as just another device of foreign occupation. Hence, if election plans proceed, they will merely become the latest lightning rod for insurgency and terrorism, replacing police stations as the target du jour.

The assumption or seizure of central authority in Iraq has never constituted a true representative government accepted by the warring tribal factions. In consequence, even if the election takes place, even if the Shiites deliver a statistical majority for the turnout, the forces of Sunni and insurgent rejection will demonize them as illegitimate, thus further plunging the populace into violence.

Indeed, the Islamic Army, among the most organized of the several insurgent groups, has announced that no election can take place in Iraq as long as infidel occupation forces occupy Iraq. They promise to target all who participate or even recognize the results, Iraqi or foreigner.

Adding a volatile additional dimension is the distinct possibility that majority Shiite rule will not propel the nation toward Western-style democracy, but detour toward Iranian-style theocracy. Shiite Iran and the dominant Shiite holy cities such as Najaf have been joined at the hip and the heart for centuries. Citizens on both sides of the border freely pass and, in many ways, function jointly in all matters religious, spiritual and social.

Should a Shiite-controlled Iraq legislate itself into an Iranian-style theocracy, and even consider a pan-Islamic confederacy, the ramifications are towering. Such binational unions in the Islamic Middle East have been common since World War II. In 1958, Iraq was united with Jordan in the short-lived Arab Union even as Egypt and Syria created the ill-fated United Arab Republic.

The people of Iraq have never wanted Western-style pluralistic democracy or elections. The idea has always been imposed from abroad. They know their history. In 1920, the nations of the Middle East were created where no nations had previously existed by Western oil imperialism and the League of Nations; this was done solely to validate under international law the post-World War I oil joint monopolies that France and England had created. Pro-western monarchs and other rulers were installed to sign on the dotted line, legitimizing the contracts. At the same time, the Western capitals spurned the Arab national movement. When the Arabs hear the very term "democracy," they hear a codeword for "we want a stable environment for oil."

Iraq, the so-called "Cradle of Civilization," has a 7,000-year head start on the United States and Britain. If Iraqis wanted a pluralistic democracy, they could have created one without a permission slip from Washington. Elections do not make democracies; democracies make elections.

Black is the author most recently of "Banking on Baghdad, Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict."

© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.