I have no inside information on the latest election, but I was on
the ground for the 2005 rounds of elections in Fallujah, and can shed
some light and historical perspective on what happened. As your
sources noted, the Sunnis of Anbar province boycotted the first round
of elections in January, 2005. Out of a city with an approximate
population of 180,000, Fallujah saw 8,000 turn out to vote. What was
never revealed, maybe until now, is that those numbers were
significantly padded by the 4,300 Iraqi Army soldiers stationed in
Fallujah. And these soldiers were nearly all Shi'a from Baghdad or
Basra. So, in the end, less than 4,000 Fallujans actually voted in
that first election.
The job of that first assembly, as you may recall, was to draft a
constitution, like our Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Sunnis
of Al Anbar, and especially Fallujah, realized quickly that their
boycott had only resulted in ceding all the power to the Shi'a and the
Kurds. So they decided to participate in the next round of elections.
First came the constitutional referendum, which saw more than 100,000
Fallujans vote (nearly unanimously against it) in October of 2005.
Then, in December, even more Fallujans, 130,000+ by the Iraqi Election
Commission's reckoning, voted in the Iraqi National Assembly
elections.
Setting the conditions to allow this election was the major
objective of my unit at the time, and we all did everything we could
to encourage the large turnout. But it seemed to me then, and still
does, that this early emphasis on elections was certain to backfire.
Our political leaders were selling elections as if they were a magical
cure for all the problems of Iraq, that, simply by voting, Iraq would
become like all the other democracies in the world. And this clearly
was not the case.
Elections in the absence of stability might have even made things
worse, offering false hope to the soon-to-be disillusioned Sunnis of
Al Anbar. The riots and uptick in violence in Anbar province that
occurred when the election results were announced (in early 2006)
would seem to confirm this view.
Before the election I talked with a lot of Fallujans about what
the election would mean to them and what they expected from it. To a
man they were convinced that Sunnis were the majority population in
Iraq and once they all voted, Sunnis would take their rightful place
at the head of government. It was impossible to counter this idea.
If I suggested that generally accepted figures by the U.N. placed
Sunni Arabs at about 20% of all Iraqis they would dismiss it out of
hand. Who gave you those figures? The Shi'a? Iran? I remember the
old men saying, "How can this be? Look around you, everyone here is
Sunni. Everyone I know is Sunni. You Americans are so naïve to believe
everything the Shi'a tell you."
During these conversations, I recalled our training on Iraqi
culture prior to our deployment. A professor from Georgetown
University had warned us (mostly college educated officers) how
different it would be to interact with illiterate people. Most people
in Al Anbar could not read, she said, and therefore they had only
their limited personal experience, and the words of their elders, to
provide context to their reality. For a literate person, it is
virtually impossible to comprehend how an illiterate person processes
information. How true this observation turned out to be. The idea
that our civilian leadership thought liberal democracy would spring up
naturally in this environment still seems incomprehensibly foolish to
me.
I think the folly of introducing "democracy" with the hasty
election scheme was disastrous and foreseeable. Any serious student
of geopolitics knows that the rule of law is the fundamental precursor
to a functioning democracy - institutions, culture, accepted norms...
need to be shaped and accepted thoroughly over generations. Our own
democracy did not drop out of the sky in 1776, it was a product of
centuries of British history. As the already sixty year rise of South
Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc. reveal, the transition from rule of law
to democracy occurs in different ways in different cultures, and
typically takes several decades, not months.
As the recent election reveals, Iraq might very well be on that
path of transition at last, but I hope our leaders finally understand
that it will happen in Iraqi fashion, and will likely be a
decades-long process. So hopefully we will ask ourselves whether we
want to take the ride with them, or if we have found a good spot to
get off.
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