Transforming an ethic of fear

Over the last seven years, Iraqis have had to endure great suffering: foreign occupation, sectarian conflict, a breakdown in infrastructure, the flight of millions of their countrymen to surrounding nations, a relentlessly violent insurgency, along with a host of other calamities in between. Thus when they went to the polls last Sunday, it was with the expectation that the lawmakers they chose would genuinely strive to stabilise their country and put an end to that suffering.

The campaign for votes was hard. But what comes next will surely be harder.

Will Iraqi leaders act maturely, and quickly, to form a new government that will be seen by most Iraqis as responsive to their aspirations, or will these leaders compete for months over top jobs in the new administration, and over the nebulous issue of elected candidates' former affiliations with the Baath Party, thereby creating post-election chaos? The challenges are real.  The outlook is grim. And judged by events this week, the prospects are ominous.

Leave aside the notion that US officials had deemed the elections "historic", the fact remains that the legitimacy of these elections, historic or not, is about to be undermined mere days after the polls closed.

An electoral commission, sporting the lofty name of the Justice and Accountability Commission, headed by none other than the mercurial and divisive Ahmad Chalabi, who earlier had sought to disqualify as many as 500 candidates from running for office because of past affiliations with the Baath, has now disqualified 55 mostly Sunni candidates who ran on the secular and nationalist Iraqia list — an arbitrary act that not only could seriously disrupt the formation of a new government, but risk alienating the Sunni community, which, in 2005, had completely boycotted voting in the national elections.

Do Iraqis want to return to those dreadful old days, between 2006 and 2007, when insurgents left 3,000 of their kinsmen dead every month, or when, in the words of General Stephen Lanza, a spokesman for the American military in Iraq, they "used to wake every morning with another hundred bodies in the river"?

The problem facing Iraq today is not its violent insurgency, which began to damp down three years ago, but its political culture. And make no mistake about it, the reason the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates has failed to lift itself up by its bootstraps is the chicanery and unbridled corruption that embody this political culture. Here's a land blessed with bountiful oil wealth. Yet, its people, according to World Bank rankings of per capita income around the world, comes 162nd. Government institutions are dysfunctional, the bureaucracy is corrupt and public services are dismal, with less than a quarter of Iraqis receiving adequate electricity and health care. And this after most of the country's huge debts were forgiven in 2004 and Iraqis were to start afresh after the long nightmare of Baathist authoritarian rule.

Will disputes over the underhanded way in which 55 secular candidates were disqualified, or the anticipated prolonged bargaining over who runs the new government and its various ministries, open the door to renewed violence between Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, seculars and sectarians in this fragmented land, leaving it by the wayside as a failed State?

The mark of a failed State is when you choose not to engage your political opponent — either in debate or in court — but to off him. In a democracy, with democracy being not just a political system but a social ethos generated and acquired by shared consensus, we accept others who embrace an adversarial voice, individuals whose necessary role in social life is to seek an articulation of the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct. 

Ideological currents

Iraqi society, no less and no more than any other society in the world, is imbued with a great many ideological currents and political sensibilities, a stratification of class, a multiplicity of ethnic and religious groupings and so on. Consider the US, as a case in point, where people of different ethnic provenance, cultural background, national origin, political persuasion and native parlance share a communal sense of reference as Americans — and do it all with impressive ease.

It would never occur to me, for example, to consider being Palestinian, Muslim and American as anything but three equivalent centres of my identity, any more than it would occur to anyone in my milieu to dispute this perfectly pedestrian stance.

Why is it that Iraqis can't get along? Perhaps it is because for generations, they were socialised on an ethic of fear — fear of innovation, fear of spontaneity, fear of originality — that had instilled in them the need to accept orthodoxy, uniformity and obedience to authority. A society such as this will bring with it a specific mental set, a mental set that takes great effort to transform.

It is up to the Iraqi leadership elite to do the transforming. Sadly, and judging by their behaviour last week, this political elite appears to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. All the sadder for Iraq and its future prospects.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.