Mission Accomplished

"Democracy perishes by two excesses, the aristocracy of those who govern, or the contempt of the people for the authority it has itself established, a contempt in which each faction or individual reaches out for the public power, and reduces the people, through the resulting chaos, to nullity, or the power of a single man" --Robespierre

"Terrorism and tyranny lie in the eye of the beholder; and under democracy each beholder will not only perceive for themselves, but is explicitly entitled to do so" --John Dunn

Despite the gloom of the media and much of the public, one American success in Iraq has been studiously ignored: Iraq today is a democracy. This uncomfortable and perhaps counter intuitive truth is far more indicative of the dangers of democracy than it is of anything positive about Iraq. What we are seeing in Iraq is democracy. What we want in Iraq, and what we have in the United States, is not democracy.

For all the messianic talk about America's timeless and selfless mission to spread democracy, America would never dare impose actual democracy on itself, never mind other nations. Democracy in its purest form is better known as anarchy, and democracy clearly thrives in Baghdad.

Direct democracy is the cataclysm that is brutalizing Iraqi society. Far from something to be strived for, direct democracy holds that every person has an equal right to exercise his or her own power and prerogative. This system is very difficult to maintain in small groups. In groups of over 200 or so, it is essentially impossible. In groups of 25 million it is nihilistic insanity.

Representative democracy is what we have, to some degree, in the United States and what we implicitly envisioned for Iraq. Compared to direct democracy, this brand is less vulnerable to mob rule and populist suppression of minorities. Each member of the community does not have a say in every decision, but their representatives do.

The Iraqi government exists only on television because Iraqis have largely rejected representative democracy, hence their elected representatives have little or no actual power. Rather, many Iraqis have opted for direct democracy, manifested at personal levels by neighborhood militias and institutionalized vigilantism.

Many Americans, including myself, would like to see a greater degree of direct democracy in the United States. Look at the architects of the Iraq War, for example. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice. Among these power brokers, only Bush and Cheney were subject to an election, and even they were not held to the most fundamental criteria of a popular vote. We could stand to be a bit more democratic, at least when it comes to selecting our representatives.

Actual democracy is not something to be idealized, or even necessarily tolerated. It is a practice that does not exist in any nation state, and indeed never could. Even Luxembourg has far too many people to allow every citizen to weigh in on every issue. Iraq also has far too many people to attempt this, but too many Iraqis are insisting on exercising their new "rights", usually via acts of violence.

The Iraqi embrace of direct democracy, in retrospect, was clear immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Why would people loot anything that wasn't tied down and a great many things that were? They were simply exercising what they perceived to be they newly-acquired "rights". The ubiquitous anecdote of the Iraqi in the street in 2o03 had him saying, "democracy means we are free to do whatever we want".

The American government, of course, was unable to understand the importance of this mentality. Donald Rumsfeld, an intelligent yet exceedingly stupid man, dismissed the looting as evidence that "freedom is messy". He was right. Freedom, total freedom, is very messy. In fact, society is impossible if people are truly free.

The looting and the dominance of locally-based militias are evidence of Iraqis' embrace of direct democracy. The utter impotence of Iraq's government is evidence of Iraqis' rejection of representative democracy. Keeping this in mind, it is not surprising that Iraq has only become less stable since the representative government took nominal control.

Iraqis' rejection of the representative democracy offered by the Green Zone government reflects their embrace of several manifestations of more direct democracy via neighborhood militias and provincial and sectarian loyalties and identities. Simply put, representative democracy fails when people decided that their representatives don't represent them.

It speaks to the naivete of our prewar mentality that we thought that real democracy was a good idea anywhere, never mind Iraq. How can we hope to impose alien ideologies onto alien cultures when those ideologies are alien even to ourselves?