Part 1: can Iraq become and remain a democracy?

Invited to speak to the U.S. intelligence community about the prospects for democracy in Iraq, I prepared a paper that treats strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as well as policy options.  I’ll post it here over the next couple of days.  If you prefer to read it all at once, please visit Al Arabiya, which published the full paper today.  Here are the first two parts:  strengths and weaknesses:

Getting to Denmark

By

Daniel Serwer

Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Iraq is already a proto-democracy.  Relatively free and fair elections chose its current parliament, 80 per cent of which are newly elected members.  It has in theory an independent judiciary that is supposed to decide issues based on the law.  It has lively media that are not entirely government-controlled and a vibrant civil society, including a multitude of political parties and nonprofit associations.  Until the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, Iraq was arguably the most democratic Arab state.  Even today it likely still merits that appellation.

But “the most democratic Arab state” is not saying much.  Iraq is still far from Denmark and likely never will meet the EU’s Copenhagen criteria.  What will it take to move it farther in that direction and prevent Iraq from slipping back into autocracy?

1. Strengths

Iraq has a state, established in accordance with a constitution adopted by referendum in October 2005.  It is an Islamic federal republic, “in which the system of government is republican, representative, parliamentary, and democratic.” The state is asymmetrically federal, providing a wide degree of autonomy to Kurdistan and somewhat lesser degrees to the 15 non-Kurdish governorates.  The state came close to total collapse in 2003 and again in 2006-7 but has slowly recovered since.  Today it manages a budget of $82.6 billion, produces oil at a rate of about 2.2 or more million barrels per day, sometimes makes a minimal basket of food available to virtually every Iraqi and produces 8000 MW of electricity.

The Council of Representatives is the supreme legislative body, and there are also provincial, municipal and district councils as well as a Kurdistan parliament.  The Council of Representatives has been elected twice under the current constitution, and it has twice chosen the President and Vice Presidents of the Republic as well as approving the Prime Minister and his government.

The independence of the judiciary is guaranteed by Article 87 of the Constitution.  The Federal Supreme Court is established pursuant to Articles 92 and 94 of the Constitution.

In short, Iraq has the right institutions on paper.  Its weaknesses lie elsewhere.

2. Weaknesses

Iraq has little history of democratic governance.  While the monarchy was in principle a constitutional one, little of liberal democratic culture survived 45 years of autocracy.  The Ba’athist regime led Iraq into three catastrophic wars (with Iran and with two different U.S.-led coalitions) and established a standard for brutality that has rarely been exceeded.  It will not be easy to turn the Republic of Fear into the Republic of Hope.

The current Iraqi system of governance is complex.  It requires for its effective operation a high degree of cooperation and coordination among different levels of government, and among entities at each level of government.  Good governance would not be easy even under ideal conditions.

Conditions are far from ideal.  While violence is dramatically down from its peak in 2006/7, it has ticked up recently, as a wave of assassinations has struck security officials and politicians even as suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices continue more indiscriminate killing.  The government response is not always respectful of the rule of law, and pressures to crack down hard to repress the violence are strong.

The current government, formed in December 2010, is far from cohesive.  It is a broad coalition that includes all the major political coalitions and commands in theory a big majority in the Council of Representatives.  But the political coalitions dictated the choice of its members, the prime minister has not named key security ministers so retains those portfolios himself, and political tension is high between Prime Minister Maliki and Iyad Allawi, who head the most key partners in the coalition.

Despite the formation of this “national partnership” coalition with participation from the major Shia, Sunni and Kurdish political groups, sectarian and ethnic tensions continue to plague the government.  There is little sign of programmatic coherence in its deliberations, beyond general avowals of support for democracy and human rights.  With some exceptions, the ministers seem more committed to protecting their own party, sectarian and ethnic interests than to providing Iraq’s citizens with the kind of good governance many of them would like.

The relationship between Iraqi citizens and their government is in fact tenuous.  More than 90% of the government’s revenue comes directly from oil, not taxes.  This makes Iraq an oil rentier state with no need to convince citizens of the value of the services it provides in order to obtain revenue.  While Revenue Watch has ranked Iraq ahead of other Middle Eastern oil producers in revenue transparency, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index used foreigners’ perceptions to rank Iraq towards the bottom end in “abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”