The Second Election

Kieran Healy has a smart post on the prospects that Iraqi democracy will genuinely consolidate itself over the years, i.e., develop into a situation where you have not one election, but two (or three) complete with the peaceful alternation of power and so forth. The prospects aren't great but, honestly, given the nature of the ancien régime and the torments of the quasi-anarchic present, I'm not sure Iraqis need to find themselves living in a fully functioning democracy to wind up better off in the long term. Which reminds me to point out that we should be seeing the real democratic (or not, depending on how it turns out) action in Afghanistan soon after they hold their parliamentary elections. The troubles with the Afghan presidential election were basically subsumed in Hamid Karzai's overwhelming popularity. The parliamentary election should be the first opportunity for real politics in which we get to see if Karzai's opponents are willing to act as a democratic opposition party or will be more inclined to take advantage of Afghanistan's extraordinarily weak state apparatus to simply evade (or subvert) the law and possibly resist through force of arms.

Similarly, the most interesting thing to watch as the Transitional National Assembly tries to put a cabinet (and the confusing institution of the Presidency Council) together will be less who forms the government, than who forms the opposition. So far, the inclination in Iraq has been for all forces "inside the political process" to band together in the interests of fighting the insurgency. That's an understandable reaction to the circumstances, and it would be understandable if it persisted. Nevertheless, to really move toward democracy it's pretty essential that you have a peaceful, democratic opposition not just an insurgency. I think it's pretty likely that we won't get one. Instead we'll see a broad coalition of all the major factional elites trying to establish a pluralistic, but non-democratic regime capable of combatting the insurgency. Something roughly akin to what you see in Lebanon.

Based on the pure humanitarian calculus, that seems like a "good enough" outcome, even if one might hope for something better. I don't think it's especially important for critics of the war to deny that things may well wind up this way. As I've argued many times in the past, the fact that a given venture costing several hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives managed to accomplish some good things for many people is insufficient to justify the venture. The money and manpower we've deployed in Iraq could have been used to bring about regime change in Burma or to provide clean drinking waters to millions of people or to halt genocide in Darfur or to block the Iranian nuclear program or any number of other things.

If Iraq winds up in an okay state, all those opportunity costs will be forgotten and war opponents will (unjustly) appear to have been discredited by events. That's wrong, but I could live with it. It would be better, certainly, then us achieving public vindication by a spiral in which things get worse and worse. Speaking reality-based, war proponents have been thoroughly discredited ever since the national security case (WMD plus al-Qaeda ties) fell apart a long, long time ago. Anyone who actually proposed an undertaking on this scale for purely humanitarian purposes would be laughed out of the room, and rightly so. Beyond that, the odds of real success remain long, and even if we do succeed the humanitarian benefits of the massive increase in the Iraqi death rate caused by this adventure seem questionable.