Iraqi scenarios

I went to a pre-lunch presentation on Iraq today given by our dear friend Adeed Dawisha. It was really good to see him. When he was last in Charlottesville, back last October, our conversation was a little stilted since he was a big supporter of Prez Bush’s war effort…
Well, our opinions on the advisability of launching that war still differ hugely, but now, there’s no point any more in arguing about it.
Regarding the present and future of Iraq– the country that Adeed grew up in– we can agree on some things and differ on others. So now at least, it’s easier to talk with him!
Adeed’s view of the present situation and future prospects in Iraq is considerably rosier than mine. Though I noted that it is now not nearly as rosy as the kind of scenario he sketched out when he was here back in October.
He and his spouse Karen Dawisha also had an article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, in which they argued that there are some fairly good prospects for the establishment– or re-establishment, as they claim– of democracy in Iraq.
In that article, they argued that two major assets Iraq has that will help build democracy there are (1) a large and well-educated middle class, and (2) a history of pluralism in the pre-Saddam era.
He made part of that same argument today. Well, the part about the middle class.
Personally, I’m a bit wary of that argument. It seems to spring from a generally unexamined classist kind of fallacy that people elsewhere who are “of the same class as us” will therefore end up thinking like us.
One thing I’ve learned from my close study of Lebanese and Palestinian society is that people who are bulwarks of the middle class– educated people, people of generally conservative social and economic views– in those societies don’t necessarily end up thinking like Jeffersonian democrats. In fact, they often end up being bulwarks of Islamist movements.
It was actually Ziad Abu Amr– Abu Mazen’s present emissary to Hamas– who pointed out to me when we were doing research together in Palestine back in the late 1980s that it was his best students from Bir Zeit University who would tend to gravitate toward Hamas and Islamic Jihad. That is, the students who stuck to their books, studied hard and effectively (and didn’t spend time running after girls, etc etc)– and who then went on to become very solid middle-class members of many different professions.
I think the ones who were less studious, more easily distractable, would be the ones who’d end up in the secular nationalist organizations.
And I’ve also noted the same phenomenon in Lebanon.
People in the west tend to have these stereotypical views of people of Islamist political leanings that they are all (1) wild-eyed radicals from the poorest segments of society, and (2) dyed-in-the-wool misogynists. I know for a fact that (1) is not true. And I’m open to entertaining a more nuanced view of things regarding (2)…
So even if, as Adeed claimed this morning, the benevolent occupation forces in Iraq (!) can succeed in getting people there back to work, and then the middle class will find its social and political footing there once again– well, according to Adeed, this would instantly make democracy a much more likely outcome. Myself, I’m not nearly as certain that this is so. (Nor, actually, am I certain about any of the antecedent logical steps in that argument.)
In this amazingly prescient post that I wrote on April 12 (from Tanzania), I wrote:
“People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order. The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so… In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order… In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need… “
Hey, did I call it, or what?
Anyway, one other last note from the morning’s session before I get up to go out to dinner with Karen and Adeed–
This is definitely the “oldster” crowd that gathers there at the Miller Center for Public Affairs for their mid-morning discussions. (Good for the no-night-driving crowd.) At 50 yrs old, I was probably the third youngest person in a room of some 40-50 people. But it’s a crowd that includes a lot of smart, well-informed people.
In the 35-minutes-plus of discussion that followed Adeed’s presentation about Iraq, the words “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “Ahmad Chalabi” did not come up once.
I think this tends to confirm my suspicion that the WMD issue (as in, who was it who by grossly inflating the size of the WMD threat jerked us into this war, anyway?) may not really develop political legs unless things go visibly very badly for the US occupation force in Iraq.
As for Ahmad Chalabi– boy, has he ever dropped off the map! Justifiably so, I think.
And of the other former heroes of the Iraqi exile– whatever happened to Rend Francke?? She’s the head of the (pro-democracy) Iraq Foundation in DC. When I last heard about her, Caryle Murphy was quoting her in the Washington Post— must have been February, maybe– as saying she planned to be aboard the first of the US tanks that entered Baghdad!!!!
Has anyone heard anything of her since?