The Sham of Democracy
Like many of you, I was in fits of laughter at the sight of George Bush being pelted with shoes the other day. It was certainly a piece of drama not to be missed.
However, there are as ever some interesting things to take from this incident. Firstly, the way in which George Bush dealt with the incident. His quick reaction saves him from being hit by the first shoe and his arm is up straight away to block the second ‘missile’ long before any security officials are surrounding him. This shows how quick to react Bush is – perhaps too quick for some people’s liking.
More importantly though is the whole issue of why the shoe was thrown. To chuck a shoe at someone, or to show them the sole is the biggest insult an Arab can chuck at another person. When the statue of Saddam came down in 2003, Iraqis were all hitting the iron sculpture with their shoes. Clearly, the way in which the Americans have gone about things in Iraq after the initial invasion leaves a lot of unanswered questions, however what I see here is an interesting thing. A man is unhappy, angered by the actions of the Bush administration so he hurls his shoe at the President. I bet he didn’t consider that under Saddam’s Iraq, he wouldn’t have had the freedom to do such things. Therefore the fact that he did what he did shows how free a country Iraq is post Saddam Hussein.
In 2003, the USA and coalition forces invaded Iraq to bring about freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq. I am well aware that this is a touchy topic, but I was and still am a supporter of the mission overall. I happened to have read the UN resolutions 1339, 1440, 1441 and 1442 which all call for Saddam to come clean about his weapons. He refused and so America decided enough chat at the UN was enough and sorted it out themselves. I therefore disagree that the war was illegal, but where I do side with the sceptics is the way the situation was handled after the initial ‘shock and awe’ phase. America’s ‘shoot first, think later’ strategy was a nonsense from the beginning and the situation presented after the official campaign proved this.
The overarching aim, Bush said, was to bring “freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq”. That’s a fair enough objective. The country was under a terrible tyranny, a tyranny which was a security threat to the US itself. However, where the US has got it all wrong is to presume that their brand of democracy can be uplifted and re-camped anywhere in the galaxy. The problem with this is that it leaves out a vital factor – culture.
The Arab people are (and I know this is a generalisation and not true in all cases) rather lawless people. One only has to watch one of their funerals and the point is proven. They therefore need to have a highly authoritarian and centralised system of government in place to keep the state in check.
Iraq under Saddam was stable, granted that stability was born out of suppression and a few hundred state sponsored murders, but nevertheless it gave stability. As soon as America removed that system, the country went crazy. We had a religious war between two rival factions of Islam each vying for power and then we had no army or police to enforce the law. It was utter madness and I will forever wonder what got into the American’s minds to make them think they could just overthrow Saddam and the country would turn into a daisy field.
Yes, importing a western form of democracy to a country not used to anything remotely similar is going to take a long time, but the problem is that because democracy is meant to be organic, in that it is meant to grow up with a country. There is no one dictionary definition of democracy and for this reason both Russia and America can claim to have democracies. Americans will say Russia doesn’t, but this is because they expect to see certain things with democracy, whereas the Russians see it differently. If want to know more about why democracy is hard to define, then please read my essay on this very topic.
Iraq will therefore never have a mirror democracy to that of the US because of it’s inherent differences in culture which do not allow for the same brand of democracy on show in America. This does not mean Iraq cannot be democratic, but it does mean it cannot be democratic in what we might term as democratic.
I suggest that what will work best for Iraq is a very powerful, highly authoritarian elected dictatorship as it will help to control the population, but the electorate is able to out vote the government at regular competitive elections. Of course, there will have to be a strong system of checks and balances in place to ensure that the government does not just become Saddam part II. This sort of system of government I believe to be the best solution, not a perfect solution (there is no such thing), but the best solution available.
As a side, I wonder if anyone has noticed that Iraq seems to have slipped down the headlines over the last month or so. I suppose we have had this economic crisis to worry about, but I suggest that the reason it is not featuring in the news so prominently is because things are going reasonably well. The insurgency has drastically lessened and less troops are being killed on a regular basis. The real battle ground is most definitely Afghanistan now. That said, we cannot abandon Iraq as it will take at least another two decades before it is anywhere close to supporting itself. Britain made the mistake of leaving South Rhodesia too early and now look at the state of the place.
Let us not make the same mistake in Iraq. After creating a mess, it is now our moral responsibility and duty to clear it up before moving onto our next ‘project’.
