How To Stop
Civil War
By George Monbiot
30 August, 2005
The
Guardian
Between
the idea and the reality falls the shadow of occupation. Whatever the
parliamentarians in Iraq do to try to prevent total meltdown, their
efforts are compromised by the fact that their power grows from the
barrel of someone else's gun. When George Bush picked up the phone last
week to urge the negotiators to sign the constitution, he reminded Iraqis
that their representatives - though elected - remain the administrators
of his protectorate. While US and British troops stay in Iraq, no government
there can make an undisputed claim to legitimacy. Nothing can be resolved
in that country until our armies leave.
This is by no means the only problem confronting the people who drafted
Iraq's constitution. The refusal by the Shias and the Kurds to make
serious compromises on federalism, which threatens to deprive the central,
Sunni-dominated areas of oil revenues, leaves the Sunnis with little
choice but to reject the agreement in October's referendum. The result
could be civil war.
Can anything be done? It might be too late. But it seems to me that
the transitional assembly has one last throw of the dice. This is to
abandon the constitution it has signed, and Bush's self-serving timetable,
and start again with a different democratic design.
The problem with
the way the constitution was produced is the problem afflicting almost
all the world's democratic processes. The deliberations were back to
front. First the members of the constitutional committee, shut inside
the green zone, argue over every dot and comma; then they present the
whole thing (25 pages in English translation) to the people for a yes
or no answer. The question and the answer are meaningless.
All politically
conscious people, having particular interests and knowing that perfection
in politics is impossible, will, on reading a complex document like
this, see that it is good in some places and bad in others. They might
recognise some articles as being bad for them but good for society as
a whole; they might recognise others as being good or bad for almost
everyone. What then does yes or no mean?
Let me be more precise.
How, for example, could anyone agree with both these statements, from
articles 2 and 19 respectively? "Islam is the official religion
of the state and is a basic source of legislation: no law can be passed
that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." (In other words,
the supreme authority in law is God.) "The judiciary is independent,
with no power above it other than the law."
Or both these, from
articles 14 and 148? "Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination
because of sex, ethnicity, nationality, origin, colour, religion, sect,
belief, opinion or social or economic status"; "Members of
the presidential council must ... have left the dissolved party [the
Ba'ath] at least 10 years before its fall if they were members in it."
Faced with such
contradictions, no thoughtful elector can wholly endorse or reject this
document. Of course, this impossible choice is what we would have confronted
(but at 10 times the length and a hundred times the complexity) had
we been asked to vote on the European constitution. The yes or no question
put to us would have been just as stupid, and just as just as stupefying.
It treats us like idiots and - because we cannot refine our responses
- reduces us to idiots. But while it would have merely enhanced our
sense of alienation from the European project, for the Iraqis the meaninglessness
of the question could be a matter of life and death. If there is not
a widespread sense of public ownership of the country's political processes,
and a widespread sense that political differences can be meaningfully
resolved by democratic means, this empowers those who seek to resolve
them otherwise.
Last week George
Bush, echoed on these pages by Bill Clinton's former intelligence adviser
Philip Bobbitt, compared the drafting process in Baghdad to the construction
of the American constitution. If they believe that the comparison commends
itself to the people of Iraq, they are plainly even more out of touch
than I thought. But it should also be obvious that we now live in more
sceptical times. When the US constitution was drafted, representative
democracy was a radical and thrilling idea. Now it is an object of suspicion
and even contempt, as people all over the world recognise that it allows
us to change the management but not the firm. And one of the factors
that have done most to engender public scepticism is the meaninglessness
of the only questions we are ever asked. I read Labour's manifesto before
the last election and found good and bad in it. But whether I voted
for or against, I had no means to explain what I liked and what I didn't.
Does it require
much imagination to see the link between our choice of meaningless absolutes
and the Manichean worldview our leaders have evolved? We must decide
at elections whether they are right or wrong - about everything. Should
we then be surprised when they start talking about good and evil, friend
and foe, being with them or against them?
Almost two years
ago Troy Davis, a democracy-engineering consultant, pointed out that
if a constitutional process in Iraq was to engender trust and national
commitment, it had to "promote a culture of democratic debate".
Like Professor Vivian Hart, of the University of Sussex, he argued that
it should draw on the experiences of Nicaragua in 1986, where 100,000
people took part in townhall meetings reviewing the draft constitution,
and of South Africa, where the public made 2 million submissions to
the drafting process. In both cases, the sense of public ownership this
fostered accelerated the process of reconciliation. Not only is your
own voice heard in these public discussions, but you must also hear
others. Hearing them, you are confronted with the need for compromise.
But when negotiations
are confined to the green zone's black box, the Iraqis have no sense
that the process belongs to them. Because they are not asked to participate,
they are not asked to understand where other people's interests lie
and how they might be accommodated. And when the whole thing goes belly
up, it will be someone else's responsibility. If Iraq falls apart over
the next couple of years, it would not be unfair, among other factors,
to blame the fact that Davis and Hart were ignored. For the people who
designed Iraq's democratic processes, history stopped in 1787.
Deliberative democracy
is not a panacea. You can have fake participatory processes just as
you can have fake representative ones. But it is hard to see why representation
cannot be tempered by participation. Why should we be forbidden to choose
policies, rather than just parties or entire texts? Can we not be trusted?
If not, then what is the point of elections? The age of purely representative
democracy is surely over. It is time the people had their say.
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