Electoral democracy has taken its lumps in post-conflict situations. The lead-up to elections is statistically correlated with a rise in violence while the post-election period doesn’t lead to a substantial drop-off. Participatory direct democracy is a popular tool at the low levels, but the two don’t have to be linked. Protection of minority rights can even be at odds with majoritarian democracy. For a round up of some of these critiques you can see Fareed Zakaria’s The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. And obviously not even those wacky neo-cons thinks it actually works in the way shown below.
Nonetheless, the strength of democracy is not picking good leaders but in kicking out bad ones. Similarly while democracy can lead to problems with minority rights, it’s also rather good at bringing in excluded factions. In the Iraqi case, this process was slower because of electoral boycotts (have those ever worked?) but now the Sunni Awakening groups and Sadr’s people, if not Sadr himself, are likely to participate in the upcoming provincial elections.
Those thinking we may be staying in Iraq for another ten years, and that think this is a good thing, tend to say that Prime Minister Maliki is just responding to domestic political pressure. His chief Shiite rival, Sadr, seems to have lost some support as a result of the tougher line. They may be right in the source, but as the SOFA negotiations shows, they are very wrong in the implications. The U.S. occupation is massively unpopular, the surge and associated efforts strengthened Maliki’s hand, but that just makes him less dependent on the U.S. and thus better able to negotiate a tough deals. The Sunni’s also managed to win a concession and adopt my favorite suggestion [update: notably proposed by the PCR team over at CSIS] on handling Iraq, a referendum on the agreement and thus the occupation. If we can’t win that referendum in July we’ll need to be out in 18 months and not 3 years.
Of course, at the same time, democracy has been working in America. Kicking out our old leadership led to the Iraqis trusting that withdrawal might actually get implemented and progress on the SOFA. As Matt Yglesias notes, Obama did not ‘get lucky’ that the Iraqis supported his withdrawal plan. Instead, he was aware of the unpopularity of the occupation and incorporated that into his plan. Good policy can make for politics.
Also, some commenters seem to think this is a win for the admin. Chill people. We need to be out of Iraqi cities by the end of 2009, that substantially limits what we can actually do on the ground, and there’s a deadline for total withdrawal, absent circumstances short of negotiating a new agreement, by 2011. Our contractors no longer have legal protections. In short, we are staying on an uncomfortable SOFA, it does not fold out to make a bed, unlike Japan, Germany, or Korea, this is not a long term arrangement.
Cool you found the clip!
Here's the one about hunting with our favorite VP, Dick Cheney:
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/fg-dick-cheney-p1.php
Posted by: Kevin | November 29, 2008 at 11:36 PM
Ha! Nice. In fairness everyone's probably wanted to do that to Peter Griffin at some point.
Posted by: Greg Sanders | December 04, 2008 at 01:49 PM