AS American military operations slow down, the next order of business will be to set up a new apparatus of governance in Iraq, and we have President Bush’s assurance that it will be a democracy. One must not underestimate the magnitude or the arduousness of this enterprise. A quick look at the political scene in Iraq between its inception in 1921 and the overthrow of its quasi-democratic order in 1958 may give us an idea of what lies ahead.

The new state was put on the map after certain territories that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and groups of people marked by deep religious and ethnic divisions, were lumped together. Their unruliness was thus stated by their first king, Faysal I: “In Iraq there is still no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses ... devoid of any patriotic ideal, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.”

Here are some of the vital statistics. At this point (1921), Iraq had a population of only about three million (contrasted with the present 23 million) of which 80 percent were Arab, 15 per cent Kurdish, and the remaining five per cent Turkomans, Jews, and Persian-speaking people. Approximately 80 per cent of the population lived in the countryside in an essentially tribal social setting, only five per cent were literate, and of the Muslims 58 per cent were Shia.

Until 1958, great landlords possessed nearly 60 per cent of the cultivable land, and 17 per cent of all privately owned land belonged to 49 families. Rural indebtedness was common, and many of the peasants who owed money were forced to give up their holdings and become sharecroppers. Landless peasants numbered about one and a half million.

Great Britain received a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Iraq, but it decided to turn the governance over to the Iraqis as soon as possible. It controlled the new state’s defence and foreign affairs and influenced its domestic policies and administration through advisers whose number decreased from 3,000 in 1921 to 100 in 1932, the year Iraq became formally independent.

A constitution adopted in 1924 provided for a bicameral legislature and a parliamentary system of government; the lower house, the chamber of deputies, was elected, while members of the upper house were appointed (and dismissed) by the king. He named the prime minister but could not dismiss him (until the constitution was amended in 1943). That prerogative remained with the chamber of deputies to which the prime minister and his government were made accountable.

Elections were managed, and the deputies elected to the lower house had neither the will nor the skills to exercise the very considerable powers that the constitution had devolved on them. King Faysal I (1921-1933) was an exceedingly astute and determined politician who maintained extensive contacts with the notables both inside and outside the legislature, and was thus able to make and unmake governments. He was competent but unpopular; his son, Ghazi I (1933-1939) was popular but incompetent; his successor, Faysal II (1939-1958) was four years old at Ghazi’s death, and the powers of the monarch rested with his uncle, Abdul Ilah, who became the regent.

Political parties surfaced almost right away, but they were and remained factional alliances of notables, each revolving round an individual or a family. The Progress Party (established 1925) served as an instrument of the Sadun family, the National Party of the Shia politician, Jafar Abu al-Timman, the “Covenant” became a vehicle for the ambitions of Nuri al-Said, and the People’s Party for those of Yasin al-Hashimi.

Ideological and programmatic parties also appeared. Younger people, belonging to merchant families and interested in social reform and liberal democracy, formed the Ahali Party which, after World War II, came to be known as the National Democratic Party. Istiqlal Party advocated pan-Arabism, and the Ba’th, tiny until sometime after 1958, stood for Arab nationalism and socialism. The Iraqi Communist Party was small but vigorous. It organized street demonstrations some of which were large and tumultuous enough to topple governments — that of Salih Jabir in 1948, and the one headed by Mustafa al-Umari in 1954. It should be noted, however, that the ideological parties did not make much of a showing in elections.

Politics in Iraq moved around personalities, with little interest in policy issues. Politicians pretended that policy differences separated them from their rivals but that was not actually the case. Men sought public office not because they wanted to take their society in a certain direction but for the rewards it would bring — patronage, gifts, bribes, sale of jobs, partnerships with businessmen, speculative buying and selling of land.

Elections, controlled by the government of the day, were frequent but they were often held to show that a newly appointed prime minister and his team, resulting from negotiations between the king and the notables in Baghdad, were resourceful enough to put together a supportive majority in the chamber of deputies. Fifty-nine cabinets, with an average age of eight months, were sworn in between 1921 and 1958. This should not, however, be taken to signify political instability.

Cabinet changes were more like reshuffles, meaning that an individual might, and often did, hold ministerial office in many successive governments. For instance, Nuri al-Said, the most enduring politician during the period under review, served as a minister in 47 cabinets; Umar Nadhari and Taufiq al-Suwaydi served in 21 and 19 cabinets, respectively.

Before going further in this discussion of the political forces in Iraq during this period, something should be said about the status of the Kurds and the Shia. As the Ottoman control unravelled, some Kurdish intellectuals, living in Istanbul or in Europe, thought in terms of a Kurdish national state. But this does not seem to have been a consistent goal of Kurdish notables.

Several ideas, and related goals, competed for the Kurdish mind: self-determination, tribalism, and Sufism (the Qadiriya order led by Shaykh Mahmud versus the Naqshbandiya led by the brothers Shaykh Ahmad and Mulla Mustafa Barzani of Mosul). Even if the goal of a separate state exercised the Kurdish mind intermittently, the Kurds’ alienation from the Iraqi state became a constant of their disposition.

Judging by their virtual exclusion from government decision-making, one would have to conclude that the state did not treat the Kurds fairly. In all of my readings on the subject I have never seen reference to a Kurdish prime minister, and one can be sure that they were never conspicuous by their presence in any Iraqi cabinet. This may have been something of a vicious circle: the Kurds were kept out because their loyalty to the state was suspect; they became, or remained, estranged because they were kept out. In any case, controlling them came to be the Iraqi army’s principal task.

The Shia also endured neglect and exclusion. During the first twenty-five years of the state, they held less than one-third of the seats in the chamber of deputies, and only about a quarter of the seats in the cabinet, even as they constituted more than half of the country’s population. As cabinet members they were rarely allotted any of the more important departments, such as defence, foreign affairs, finance, and interior.

Shias were recruited less for their expected contribution to policy-making and more for their ability to act as intermediaries between the government and the Shia tribes. There were times when none of the fourteen governors, and less than half a dozen of the 42 district heads, were Shia. Their participation in government improved to a degree after the war: four of them served as prime minister between 1947 and 1958.

Of the domestic political forces whose support the state needed, the army would appear to have been the most critical. Its interest intertwined with that of the state. Arab officers, who had served in the Ottoman army (640 of them), needed an employer and that could be none other than the new Iraqi state. Later other educated Iraqis also looked to the army for jobs. The state in turn needed an agency of coercive force to keep the Kurds, tribal shaykhs, and Shia notables from breaking away.

Knowing that the state needed them to implement its goals and policies, the army officers soon began to feel entitled to participation in governance. As far back as 1936, General Bakr Sidqi forced Prime Minister Yasin Hashimi to resign. The next government, headed by Hikmat Sulayman, was overthrown the following year. In subsequent years, while the officers played a part in the replacement of one politician by another as prime minister, they did not abolish the civilian government and install a military regime — until 1958.

It is difficult to understand why the officers executed a bloody coup — killing the young king, the prime minister, and many others — and seized the government in 1958. This was a time when the country was doing reasonably well: education, health care, and building of the infrastructure were going forward, and the rising oil revenues fuelled prosperity. It is possible that the Egyptian revolution in 1952, and stories of Nasser’s success in bringing about significant political and economic change spurred the Iraqi officers. The ease with which they got away with murder tells us also how fragile the Iraqi democracy had been.

It is striking that the forces inhibiting democracy in Iraq were essentially the same as those working against it in Pakistan and several other developing countries, to wit: an overlay of feudalism in rural relationships; ethnic, linguistic, and religious divisions; long tradition of authoritarian rule; primacy of the personal over the public interest; factionalism; reliance on the military to maintain public order and hold the country together. If democracy has had a difficult time striking roots in Pakistan, it is not surprising that it failed to flourish in Iraq.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US.

E-mail syed.anwar@attbi.com

THE alarm bells have started ringing sooner than even the pessimists amongst us expected. The prime minister warns the whole system might collapse. The opposition’s laconic response to that is “so be it”.

The fate of democracy in the country now hinges on the Legal Framework Order. The parliament in the three months of its existence has conducted no business, and done no good, nor will be allowed to if the extremist sentiment in the opposition continues to prevail.

The threatened boycott and bedlam is preventing even the president from addressing both houses — NA and Senate — assembled together which he must at the commencement of the first session after a general election. Under Article 56(3) of the Constitution this address of the president is mandatory. One imagines the law experts of the government and the opposition alike will be wrestling with the legal consequences of its indefinite delay and whether the parliament can at all start working before the president has addressed its joint session. But then the opposition contends the country has no president who can address the parliament. The prime minister’s apprehension of an impending collapse is, thus, real.

The leaders who hold the view that the LFO has no constitutional validity do not care to explain why they chose to contest elections to the parliament under that very LFO. If the president’s appointment under it is invalid so is their membership as the elections were held under the articles of the Constitution that the LFO amended. Thus, if their viewpoint is conceded, the entire electoral process and the parliament and the provincial assemblies that came into being as a result also becomes invalid. The whole caboodle would then come crashing down.

The only explanation for participating in the elections under an Order viewed as illegal has now come forth from Qazi Hussain Ahmad in his Dawn Dialogue. Using a Muslim dietary aphorism he says it was like eating pork when the survival is at stake. That is his version of the doctrine of necessity. The question that should still be debated is: Is not the survival of the constitutional system, and the country itself, in greater danger today than it was in October of last year? How about a bit of more pork!

But then Qazi Sahib has a compromise formula to break the cycle of illegality. General Musharraf, he says, should quit his post of the chief of army staff, and the parliament in turn should elect him as president for five years. He also proposes to empower the president to dismiss the cabinet instead of the parliament under Article 58(2)(b).

The Qazi formula perpetuates, and not ends, what he considers to be an illegality. If the LFO is illegal, then whatever the parliament does will also be illegal for it is born of the LFO. The formula is also impracticable as many parliamentary groups — PPP and Nawaz faction of the Muslim League in particular — continue emphatically to assert that the LFO has no validity, no sanctity and admits of no compromise. Implicit in this uncompromising position is the dissolution of the parliament and provincial assemblies and elections afresh under the constitutional provisions as they stood before the LFO or, that not happening, Pervez Musharraf becoming the Chief Executive once again.

Thus, neither the Qazi compromise nor the total rejection of the LFO can save the parliament. Even if for argument’s sake the legality of the Qazi formula were to be conceded and General Musharraf were also to agree to it, the other less orthodox and secular groups in the parliament would be loath to see the president, Q-Muslim League and MMA embedded in power for five years. The two-thirds majority needed to give effect to the formula thus would not be forthcoming.

In the existing balance of forces within the parliament and outside, the only practical course open to political elements now is to acquiesce in the “illegality” of the presidency and the parliament as they did in the October 10 elections. In law and ethics all three stand on the same footing. The time to boycott was the October 10, 2002. That would have, in all likelihood, made the election look like Musharraf’s referendum.

The lesson from the past is that an authoritarian regime pushed to the wall gives way not to democracy but to another individual or cabal more repressive or ambitious. The PPP, MMA, Nawaz League and the rest should be under no illusion that they would succeed Musharraf if he leaves. Those who made Ayub and Bhutto leave didn’t.

Many among those who want the LFO to be discarded now also need to realize that but for the LFO they would not have found their way into the parliament. They have come in only because the seats were increased, many established political forces and leaders were sidelined under the LFO and election malpractices went unchecked. All that in retrospect looks an enormous waste of public money and effort for which the political parties are to be blamed more than the government.

The best course for the parliamentarians — whether in the government or opposed to it — now to follow is to serve the people in the parliament and outside. That Musharraf wears a uniform or can dissolve the parliament should be no hindrance to the service to the people. The supremacy of the parliament sounds like a myth when one looks at the quality and amount of contribution made by the parliaments in the decade of the nineties.

They only defamed the system. Take just one specific instance: What say did the parliament of the time had in the election of Rafiq Tarar as president that it now wants that power? The banter that then went round was that the president was appointed not by the parliament, not by the majority party, nor even by the prime minister but by the prime minister’s father.

The scheme of the elections and the manipulations that accompanied it has given representation to some parties in the parliament which bears little relationship to the votes they polled. Particularly lucky, or astute, in electioneering was the MMA. With 11.1 per cent of votes the alliance garnered 19 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly. PML(Nawaz) polled more votes (11.2 per cent) but got only five per cent of the seats.

In asserting their power to bargain or the right to rule, thus, the religious parties should not be oblivious of the fact that there has been little increase in their popular vote. Yet they have a government in the NWFP all their own which could set standards of character and conduct for the others to emulate. For that no special law or fund is needed. But, as a news analyst in Dawn of April 10 said, “Virtually there exists no government in the province”. Surely it is neither Musharraf’s presidency nor the fear of the dismissal that keeps the ministers and legislators there from work.

Judged by the way the politics and governments are shaping and the mark they have made on public life, it is safe to surmise that if ever an assembly is dissolved or cabinet is dismissed it would be for poor performance or dishonourable conduct and not because of the perverse exercise of power by the president or the governors. In the half year that has gone by, the ministers, advisers and special assistants have been seen doing little but issuing statements out of place or out of turn. The surest way of inviting dismissal is to go on adding to their numbers.

The prime minister says his government would last as long as Allah wills and, further, Allah has created this country and He would also protect it. That is the belief of every Muslim and indeed of all citizens whatever their faith, but the prime minister and his men are also expected to work hard and long.

ALL’S well that end’s well. War might not be the ideal route by which to bring about regime change, but look at what it has achieved.

The threat of weapons of mass destruction has been averted. Saddam Hussein is in hiding, maybe even dead. His people, liberated from decades of oppression, are celebrating on the streets. Humanitarian assistance is being administered and much more is on the way. All this in less than four weeks. Weighed against such joy and hope, civilian casualties and ‘untidiness’ (Donald Rumsfeld’s term to describe the looting in Iraq) are an acceptable — thought regrettable — price to pay.

If only it were that simple. The rosy picture of ‘liberation’ being painted by the coalition misses out on all kinds of inconvenient details — details which, when put together, make this war even less justifiable than it was when it was planned.

Take the elusive weapons of mass destruction. Of course, Iraq has them. UN weapons inspectors might have found nothing and the regime did not use them against coalition forces even when defeat was staring it in the face. True also, US and British troops have not uncovered any WMD in the towns and cities they have occupied. Even as Saddam’s chief weapons adviser surrendered to the US marines he insisted that there were no WMDs in Iraq. But none of this alters the fact that Iraq was engaged in developing some sort of chemical and/or biological weapons — it may be only a matter of time before they are found.

That, at least, is the argument being put forward by Washington and London. A more objective reading of the facts would reach quite a different conclusion, namely, that the evidence uncovered so far simply proves that the regime had a WMD programme in the past. It does not, however, prove that Iraq in 2003 posed either a significant or an imminent WMD threat to the US or any other country.

All of which leaves a huge question mark over the reason for attacking Iraq. Why go to war to deal with a threat that did not conclusively exist? There is no plain answer to this question from either the White House or the Pentagon. Denial and more subterfuge at best. For them to concede that there was no WMD threat would be to turn the suggestion of one academic — ‘this could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion’ — into fact. Admit that billions of dollars were spent and thousands of people (including several dozen of their own servicemen and women) killed without a proper reason? Impossible: Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair and their fellow war mongers can never confess to that.

Which is why, even as coalition forces continue their search for the elusive ‘smoking gun’, their spokesmen have changed the justification for the war. Yes, it was about WMD, but more than that it was about regime change — the liberation of the Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant; his people were crying out to be rid of him; America and Britain could not stand by while they suffered under his despotic rule.

If anything proves that this was one war in which the pretext for waging it was formulated after the decision to go ahead with it. If anything exposes the US’s ulterior motives for attacking Iraq, this is it. For lest anyone be taken in by Washington’s professions of concern for ordinary Iraqis, recall that it was singularly unconcerned either about the suffering inflicted on them in the preceding 24 years of Saddam’s rule, or about the suffering caused by 12 years of cruelly punitive sanctions. America’s newly discovered compassion for the Iraqi people is about as believable as the war statements made by the Iraqi information minister.

Actions speak louder than words. Had this been a war waged for the benefit of the Iraqi people, it would not have extracted such a heavy price out of them.

Thousands of civilian deaths, thousands of maimed and injured people, thousands of homes destroyed, thousands of lives turned upside down. This is the price Iraq’s people have paid for their ‘liberation’.

And what a liberation! Yes, there was joyous destruction of statues and cheering and dancing on the streets. But more than that there was looting and anarchy and suffering. Hospitals, already desperately short of medicines and equipment, were stripped bare by plunderers. Priceless artefacts in the Iraqi National Museum plundered or destroyed. Shops and businesses ransacked.

Ordinary people forced to barricade themselves in their homes, or form vigilante groups to protect themselves, their families and their property. This was the other face of the so-called Iraqi liberation.

‘American forces will not take on a policing role.’ ‘We expect the Iraqi people to know what kind of behaviour is acceptable.’ These statements by the Pentagon and Brig-Gen. Vince Brookes, respectively, are proof — if any were needed at all — of American insincerity. For a country that felt itself sufficiently entitled to change the regime in Iraq to then shrug its shoulders indifferently at the looting unleashed by its own actions, is a shocking, inexcusable and utterly repellent denial of responsibility by so-called liberators.

Had this been a war waged to relieve the hardships of the Iraqi people such crises of law and order, medical care, food, water and electricity shortages would have been foreseen and prepared for. Despite repeated warnings by UN and other aid agencies, nothing was done to deal with these. On the other hand, lucrative reconstruction contracts were dished out promptly to American firms.

Finally, adding to the already long list of wrongs in this war, is its media coverage. Many news agencies were happy to act as unofficial representatives of the coalition. By cleverly embedding them with their own forces, Washington and London ensured that their reporting could not be anything but delightfully biased. Those ‘unilateral’ journalists who tried to maintain their independence and report the other end of the war — where the bombs and shells landed — received short shrift. Some were denied access to Iraq. Others were fired by their employers — on the orders of the administration. Others still, like the unlucky cameramen on the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel and in the Al-Jazeera office, were simply killed.

Implementation and ‘victory’ have exposed this war as an ugly one. There is no shame or humiliation in having opposed it. Only a painful sense of despair that the fears voiced then have come true — and a painful sense of foreboding at what will come next.