It is possible, just possible, that the coming weeks will see the emergence
of real internal politics inside Iraq. That is, the kind of politics
marked by realistic discussion and tough negotiating among leaders of the
country’s different major factions. That’s not to say the violence will
completely go away. But if the discussions/negotiations are serious
enough, they might be able to win out over the tendency to violence, and the
country might yet be able to hold the fair, nationwide elections that everyone–everyone!–says
they want to see before the end of January 2005.
That consensus around the need for elections is a great starting point.
I guess the precedent I’m thinking most about is that of South Africa’s
early-1990s transition from brutal minority rule to a true, one-person-one-vote
system. That transition was also marked by continuing violence that
in some areas was considerable, and indeed almost threatened the country’s
ability to hold the elections in late April of 1994. A small portion
of the bowing-out minority community (the Boer-dominated “White” community)
tried to mount a rearguard action against the move to democracy, and was
able to enlist the help of pro-Buthelezi collaborators inside the Zulu community
in order to keep the violence stoked. But that didn’t work. What
predominated in the end was the very long-drawn-out process of negotiating
the “ground-rules” for how the country’s democracy would work.
Those negotiations achieved their declared aim–which in the context of
South Africa’s extremely troubled history of inter-group relations was in
itself an enormous accomplishment. But beyond that, the negotiating
process itself established some basis of trust between communities and people
where previously there had been no trust at all. And it also helped
the very underdeveloped system of political parties within the previously
unfranchised portion of the citizenry to become better formed and more stable
by virtue of the participation of these parties in the negotiation itself.
In Iraq, it was this extremely important process of internal, inter-group negotiation
over the basics of how Iraqis would live and work together in the future that
that arrogant and silly man Paul Bremer tried to completely short-circuit
earlier this year when he summarily forced the 24 members of Iraq’s quasi-puppet
Interim Governing Council to sign onto something called the “Transitional
Administrative Law”. (For my analyses at the time, read
this
and this
and this
.)
So why am I thinking now that possibly–just possibly–we might be seeing
the start of the kind of real politics inside Iraq that might–just might–signal
the possibility of the country escaping from the present tempest of violence
in which it seems mired?