The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Iraq and Democracy in the Arab World
by James Dunnigan
December 21, 2004
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
The brutal Sunni Arab opposition to the new government in Iraq is sometimes
blamed on the presence of foreign troops in the country. Yet no Arab country is
currently ruled without the application, or threat, or great brutality. There
are no Arab democracies. All are police states of one type or another, living in
fear of a violent uprising. All depend on terror to keep their populations under
control. Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party maintained control by murdering
thousands of Iraqis a year, and threatening that, and worse, to anyone thinking
of resisting. The government countermeasures included kidnapping, torture,
mutilation and group punishment. That last measure was one of the most
effective. If someone was known, or thought, to be against the government,
their family could be arrested, tortured or murdered.
The populations provided themselves some measure of protection from this kind
of tyranny by organizing into tribe or religious based organizations. Thus if
the government used its power too arbitrarily, the tribe or religious group
would resist (usually in passive ways) to escalate the dispute, and make the
government consider if this atrocity was worth it. But this sort of arrangement
also recognized the government's right to rule. Anyone who actively opposed
Saddam could be summarily killed, or worse, and the tribe or mosque would not
stir itself to help. When the tribe or mosque did rise up, the retribution was
on a massive scale.
The Sunni Arabs of Iraq generally agree that it is a bad thing for the Sunni
Arabs to no longer be ruling Iraq. Thus while community pressure among Kurds and
Shia Arabs have brought peace in that 80 percent of the population, the Sunni
Arab population backs the violence by some of their number. This is easier to do
than it was in the time of Saddam. If the Baath Party were dealing with this
kind of rebellion, thousands of community leaders would be arrested and held as
hostages to the good behavior of their followers. If some of their followers
continued to fight, those leaders would be killed, and the next in line would be
given a chance to pacify his erstwhile followers. Fallujah would have been made
an example of, with the entire city burned and bombed to the ground, and
thousands of men, women and children killed in the process. Syria did this 1982,
when Islamic radicals opposed the rule of the Baath Party. The city of Hama was
reduced to rubble, and over 20,000 people were killed. Since then, the memory of
Hama has been sufficient to suppress opposition to the dictatorial rule of the
Assad family and the Baath Party.
Because of this bloody history of brutal ruling techniques, many, inside and
outside the Arab world, insist that Arabs cannot be ruled as a democracy. The
Kurds and Shia Arabs of Iraq disagree with this. But Iraq will be the first real
Arab democracy in the region, and the continued brutal Sunni Arab resistance to
this puts the new democracy to a harsh test. Every democracy is different, and
it is feared that the new Iraqi government, to be democratically elected at the
end of January, 2005, will decide to apply some traditional solutions to the
Sunni Arab problem.
More likely, there will be more force applied by the new government, at least
more than American troops are applying, plus negotiating with the tribal and
religious leaders for deals to work out how much oil money, and how many
government jobs, the Sunni Arabs will get. Al Qaeda is not interested in this
kind of deal, but al Qaeda is widely hated by all Iraqis. It is only tolerated
by Sunni Arabs now because al Qaeda suicide bomb attacks are seen as effective
weapons. Once the majority of Sunni Arab groups have made their deals, al Qaeda
will have no place to hide. If the Sunni Arabs do not settle down, it will get
ugly. Americans forget that, at the end of the American Revolution, a third of
the population still supported the king. At the end of the revolution, over five
percent of the American population, those loyalists who would not tolerate this
new democracy, was killed or driven into exile.
Another risk in Iraq is that, if democracy does not work, another dictator
will arise. A similar situation arose after the American Revolution, when George
Washington was proposed as king of the United States (which were not nearly as
united as they are now.) Washington refused and backed giving democracy a try.
Not all new democracies stay democracies. But if people don't try, they'll never
know how far they can take it. To most Iraqis, anything's better than Saddam
Hussein and his brutal thugs.
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