Democracy in Iraq? It's a Fairy Tale
By now it should be obvious that no significant population group in Iraq wants the democracy that the Bush administration is striving so hard to establish.
The best-educated Sunnis and Christians of the Baghdad elite may admire democracy in theory but fiercely oppose it in practice because they do not want to be ruled by the Shiite majority, and still less by the emerging Kurdish-Shiite alliance.
A majority of Shiites are illiterate or almost so, and the only leaders they recognize are their imams and ayatollahs. Some of them are loud political activists, while others strive to stay out of politics. All, however, insist that Iraq must be governed by Islamic law, not by the will of an elected assembly that might violate religion as they see it by legislating equal rights for women, freedom of speech or the right to drink alcohol, among other sins.
In other words, the most likely leaders of a majority of Iraqis reject as a matter of firm religious principle the very idea of inalienable human rights, the fundamental premise of any worthwhile democracy.
The Shiite clerics of Basra are already using their new freedom to deprive others of theirs, forcing the closure of liquor stores, a trade of the local Christian minority.
As for the Kurds, our good allies who account for about 15% of Iraq's population, they certainly know more than most about the evils of dictatorship, but their own governance is much more tribal than democratic. That is why the Kurdish enclave is divided into two distinct and occasionally warring mini-states, led by the Barazanis and Talabani clans.
The smaller minorities -- Turkmen, Assyrians and Yazidis, about 5% of Iraq's population in all -- share the concerns of the Baghdad elite. They do not want to be governed by the most likely winners of any free election: Shiite clerics who vary only in the degree of their fanaticism.
Finally, there are the Sunnis of central and northern Iraq who enjoyed privileged access to relatively well-paid and mostly undemanding jobs under Saddam Hussein.
Coming from a still partly tribal culture of modest accomplishments and unlimited pride, few Sunnis know anything at all about democracy except that it will not reserve 90% of easy government jobs for less than 20% of the population. Besides, many of those jobs have disappeared now.
