News Abroad

Why Elections in Iraq Are a Lose-Lose Proposition

by Edwin Black

Mr. Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust. This article is adapted from his just-released book, Banking on Baghdad, Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict (Wiley), which chronicles 7,000 years of Iraqi history.

Iraq ’s proposed January elections are a lose-lose proposition.

Fifteen Sunni and two leading Kurdish political parties have banded together to ask Iraq’s Interim Government to postpone elections now scheduled for January 30, 2005. They claim the continuing violence and insurgency makes a vote imperiled if not impossible. That reality was driven home just days ago 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 told to stay in their homes on Election Day. The Association of Muslim Scholars, Iraq’s highest Sunni religious authority, has demanded all Sunnis boycott the electoral process.

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. “All citizens, male and female, who are eligible to vote, ” announced Sistani, “must make sure that their names are properly registered on the electoral register.” Shiite mosques are bedecked with voting banners, especially in holy cities such as Najaf and Kufa. Sistani rebuffed the 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 approximately 60 percent of the country. The dynamics of this looming 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 seventh century, taking time off to do the same for the country’s Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jews, Kurds and other minorities. In the last half of the twentieth century, the upper hand was seized by Sunni Ba’athist 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 reconstruction efforts, the oil infrastructure and 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 numerical 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 continue to 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 cause a detour speeding toward Iranian-style theocracy. Shiite Iran and the dominant Shiite holy cities such as Najaf have been deeply involved with each other for centuries. Citizens on both sides of the border freely pass and in many ways function co-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 bi-national unions in the Islamic Middle East have been common since WW II. In 1958, Iraq itself was once 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 solely to validate under international law the post-WW I oil joint monopolies France and England had created. Pro-western monarchs and other rulers were installed to sign on the dotted line, legitimizing cheap Western oil monopolies. 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.”

After years of trying to install democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, Major John Glubb, the British officer who organized the Arab Legion, complained bitterly in a letter to Whitehall: “We...imagined that we had bestowed on the Iraqis all these blessings of democracy…Nothing could be more undemocratic than the result. A handful of politicians obtained possession of the machinery of government, and all the elections were rigged... In this process they all became very rich.”

In the post-WW II decades, the West has tried to hang onto its oil lifeline in the Middle East, using our best diplomats, corporate surrogates and militaries. That has only fueled the cycle of insurrection and now world terrorism from a people who resent our presence and resource exploitation, and have always understood better than anyone exactly why we are there. The Arabs have come to believe that all the talk of democratic values is just a shibboleth of the infidel.

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