The Threat of Democracy

Amir Taheri in the Times:

The importance of what is happening in Iraq goes beyond its borders. If, as it now seems likely, Iraq does become a pluralist state committed to building a democracy, it would be hard for the despotic regimes in the region to defend a status quo that has kept much of the Middle East out of the post-Cold War trend towards reform and liberalisation.

The Iraqi constitutional debate has, thanks to the modern media, over-spilt into the whole of the Middle East and familiarised millions of people with terms and concepts regarded as taboo until the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. People are now talking about human rights, democracy, multiparty politics, federalism, gender equality, the place of faith in society, consensus, governmental accountability and, of course, parliaments and elections. New words have been invented to express concepts excluded from the Arab political lexicon by the despots. […]

The terrorist campaign has obscured the immense successes that the Iraqis have achieved. The most important of these is the destruction of the physical edifice of despotism and the slow but steady crumbling of its intellectual and moral infrastructure.

Iraq is the ideal choice as a model of democratisation in the Arab world. It faces virtually all the problems that Arab states face, including the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the status of women and the role of the clergy. Success in Iraq could inflict a strategic defeat on all despotic ideo- logies in the region.

Soon after the liberation of Iraq in 2003, Yussuf al-Ayyeri, a chief theoretician of al-Qaeda, published a book entitled The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula after the Fall of Baghdad. In it, he designated Iraq as “the greatest battlefield of Islam against the infidel and its native allies”. Al-Ayyeri wrote: “It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, its very survival, is American democracy. To allow Iraq to build would represent Islam’s biggest defeat since the loss of Andalusia.”

This is why all reactionary forces, from pan-Arabists to Islamists, and their sympathisers in the West, have united to prevent Iraq from succeeding. Iraq has become the litmus test of the success of the democratic experience in the region. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. But it is vital for everyone concerned that it does.