Praise Be to Iraqis. The people of Iraq have shown inspiring courage in voting in the face of great danger. Americans should care as much about elections as they do.
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Not all areas of the country felt safe enuf to vote, and turnout in a large part of the Sunni Triangle appears to have been very low, tho no figures have yet been released. I wanted to wait for hard figures before commenting on the election, but that might not be for awhile.
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Unfortunately, the fact remains that the election was not really democratic, since in a great many cases people voted for unnamed candidates, so had only a party affiliation to go by. It's like voting Democratic or Republican for President and Congress, without having any idea whether, in voting Democratic, you were voting for an arch-liberal like Ted Kennedy or a fanatical rightwinger like Zell Miller! Would Americans feel comfortable voting for an anonymous candidate for President? Or does it make a difference whether the Republican is George Bush or Dick Cheney? Arlen Specter or Rick Santorum? Colin Powell or Alan Keyes? Christie Whitman or Phyllis Schlafly? John McCain or Trent Lott? Rudolph Giuliani or Newt Gingrich?
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Still, a government composed of elected parties is better than a government appointed by a foreign invader.
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One feature of the election is puzzling. Some reporters suggested that a low voter turnout in Sunni areas could reduce Sunni representation in the new legislature. How is that possible? or did these reporters simply make a mistake?
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In the United States and every other country I know of, seats in a legislature are determined by the base population of a given geographic area, whether most people in that area actually vote or not. Thus, if the Sunni Triangle is given 20% of the seats in a national legislature, won't whoever is voted for, even if by only 1 person per district, still be seated in each and every one of those seats?
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Tho it's good that Iraq has had a semi-democratic election, I must rue the cost of this advance in ruin and death.
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American media commentators in the days leading up to the election spoke about electric power shortages, and sewage-flooded streets and schoolyards that the U.S. occupation has not fixed. What they have not pointed out is that the U.S. attack CAUSED these horrible conditions. Iraq was a functioning, modern society until the United States attacked and deliberately destroyed electric generating stations, power transmission lines, sewage treatment plants, and other civilian infrastructure, with no conceivable military justification, just to inflict misery on the Iraqi people. And misery they did inflict, misery that continues to this day, because nothing like all, nor even 80%, of the destruction the U.S. and Britain inflicted upon Iraq has been repaired. Nor have we brought back to life any of the 120,000 or so Iraqis the invasion and ensuing occupation have killed, and continue to kill.
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How much wiser, saner, and more decent and defensible it would have been simply to have left Saddam in power and worked to move him away from despotism, toward democracy, Iraqi-style.
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Time and again news reports of late have quoted Iraqis saying that none of the terrorism they suffer daily could have happened under Saddam. Saddam knew the dangers and had spies everywhere. He knew when foreign terrorists tried to get into Iraq. He either kept them out or found and killed them before they could do any harm. The people of Iraq had functioning electric systems and sewage systems under Saddam. We destroyed all that, and turned police-state security against terrorism into chaos in which hundreds of Iraqis a week are slaughtered by violence Saddam would have prevented.
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So Saddam was a tyrant. So what? There are scores of tyrannical regimes in countries all over this planet, some far worse than Saddam ever was. Look at the Sudan and North Korea, which have each killed millions of "their own people", the key phrase that was supposed to make us specially indignant about Saddam. There are tens of thousands of local tyrants all over this planet. Are we to invade every area on Earth where an individual tyrant abuses people?
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Saddam gave the bulk of Iraqis security, which we have stolen from them. No people has EVER valued "freedom" more than "security". Our own people have shown willingness to accept severe curtailment of civil liberties to keep us "safe". A survey of high school students released yesterday finds that:

when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high-school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

"These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous," said Hodding Carter III of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the $1 million study's sponsor. "Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation's future."

The students are even more restrictive in their views than their elders, the study says. When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.

American society at large shows no interest in U.S. detention of suspected "terrorists" (including U.S. citizens) for years without trial, despite express provisions of the Bill of Rights that insist that government cannot simply arrest people and hold them in prison for months or years but everyone is entitled to a speedy trial. We consent to ever more searches without search warrants, at airports, at government buildings, in our cars on open hiways. All in the name of "security", not least the "security" of our "freedom"! It would be funny if it weren't so sad, and contemptible.
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We could learn something from Iraqis.
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In any case, the new Iraqi assembly is to elect a president and two vice-presidents (two? are they anticipating that one will be killed?) and write a constitution. I suggest to these delegates that they should exactly parallel the U.S. Constitution, one of the most brilliant contrivances of human political ingenuity.
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Iraq has three main communities, Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. They are concentrated mainly in the south, center and northwest, and northeast of the country, respectively. That distribution lends itself to creation of three states joined in a federal union, with Greater Baghdad a neutral federal district, like the District of Columbia, with representation in an Iraqi Congress as tho a fourth state.
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The conservative Heritage Foundation on March 7, 2003 (just before the U.S. invasion) openly advocated a federal system for Iraq:

To be effective, a new post-war Iraqi government must be pluralist, one that includes the three major sub-national groups in Iraq and advances their interests. The Administration should work to persuade the leaders of Iraq's three major groups--Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, and Kurds--that a decentralized federal political system offers the best means of assuring local autonomy, protection against the return of a tyrannical central government, a fair share in the political settlement in Iraq, and an equitable disbursement of Iraq's oil and tax revenues. With such assurances, Iraq's post-Saddam leaders will be more likely to embrace a federal political system with the degree of enthusiasm that is necessary for its success.

A loose federal system organized along decentralized lines also would greatly improve regional stability. Such a post-Saddam government would be cohesive and legitimate enough to guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity and leave fewer opportunities for a central government to finance and undertake another threatening military buildup or menace its neighbors.

A good political model for such a successful post-war Iraqi federation already exists--the so-called Great Compromise of 1787 that enabled the creation of America's constitutional arrangement among the states. In Iraq's case, this type of system would give each of the country's three major sub-groups equal representation in an upper house of the legislature in order to protect each group's interests at the national level. * * *

A decentralized federal system will best fit the political realities on the ground in Iraq and best meet the needs of the Iraqi people.

It's nice to be able to agree with the Heritage Foundation about something.
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I commend to the Iraqi assembly a president-congress form of government rather than prime minister-parliament form. Parliaments are notorious for being high-handed when the ruling party has a strong majority and unstable and ineffectual when no party has a majority, so shifting coalitions must struggle to stay in power, and tiny groups can make outrageous demands as the price to keep them from shifting their votes to bring down the government.
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Terms of office for all elected officials should be fixed, not subject to abrupt termination because a vote of no-confidence brings down a government and forces new elections. When a government can be tossed out and new elections called at any time, parties spend much of their energy in subverting each other rather than working together.
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Iraq needs stability, and Iraqis must develop the spirit of compromise that comes from having to share power with people you disagree with, for a known period of time, because there's no alternative but deadlock. There is so much that needs doing that if Iraqis are faced with the fact that they are going to have to work together for the next four years, they will find a way to get along. Not so if they can instead anticipate ousting the current government in four months by vote of no-confidence. Then they would be inclined to stick to their most militant posture and work not on national reconciliation or reconstruction but on gaining the upper hand thru endless attacks upon the present leadership.
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What about proportional representation, thru which the current assembly was chosen? Iraqis are, like all peoples, split by political opinion even within the large categories (Sunni, Shia, Kurd) they might fit within. Proportional representation is a two-edged sword. On one hand, it gives minority views a chance at winning seats in the legislature. On the other hand, it disinclines people to look for a consensus candidate.
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And even if a minority candidate should win office, that only puts off by one step the need to find consensus, because his or her view will still be a minority view, and s/he will still have to work with people of other views in the legislature. So why complicate matters? Iraqis should simply adopt the winner-take-all standard for each individual office to force the formation of widely acceptable candidates from the outset. That will in turn promote the creation of a few major parties, say three to five (tho probably not just two major parties as in the U.S.), instead of the 111 that appeared on the ballot and 270 that were announced earlier.
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The advantage of a few major parties as against a host of minor parties is that people have to work together within any large party of diverse opinions, a habit of mind that Iraqis really need to make second-nature.
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At end, Iraq needs a government that is virtually identical to that of the United States. Why the U.S. pattern? Because the United States was originally 13 separate countries, each of which saw itself as different, in greater or lesser measure, from every other, and was suspicious of all the others and afraid of being overwhelmed. So during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, each state voiced its concerns and addressed ways of reassuring everyone that they would not be bullied by other states. This is the "Great Compromise of 1787" that the Heritage Foundation article above refers to, which is also called the "Connecticut Compromise".
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The Constitutional Convention was asked to decide between two competing proposals, called the "Virginia Plan" and "New Jersey Plan". Virginia in those days was one of the big states in both area and population. New Jersey was small in both. (Today, New Jersey is more populous than Virginia, and has been for decades, but because it is geographically much smaller and has a more severe winter than Virginia, it may well be that within a few decades Virginia will again have more people.)
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As explained at a National Archives webpage, Edmund Randolph of Virginia proposed a legislature of two houses, "one with members elected by the people for 3-year terms and the other composed of older leaders elected by the state legislatures for 7-year terms. Both would use population as a basis for dividing seats among the states."
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Little New Jersey had relatively few people and no land to expand westward into — Virginia not only comprised both present states of Virginia and West Virginia but also claimed what is now Kentucky, so was MUCH bigger, with lots of land to expand into. Not surprisingly, New Jersey was very worried that the big states would just crush the little states underfoot. So William Paterson (for whom the city of Paterson, 14 miles from me, is named) proposed the New Jersey Plan, a unicameral legislature in which the states were to be given equal representation. The big states said, 'No way!'
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Then little Connecticut's Roger Sherman stepped forward and offered a compromise: how about a legislature of two houses, one of which is apportioned by population and the other of which accords each state the same vote? Voila! We had a winner! We still do. And what worked to allow 13 separate countries (later joined by two more, the Texas Republic and Hawaii) to trust each other and work together can work for Iraqis too.
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So good luck to the people of Iraq in this brave new world. It is really not necessary to reinvent the wheel to ride into the future. The basic work was done in Philadelphia in 1787. You just have to write the plan down in Arabic — and Kurdish.
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Iraqis deserve what we have. Maybe they can get it by organizing themselves as we did.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:02 PM