Mark Steyn is one of the most interesting and entertaining journalists writing on international politics, at least if you share the views of most or all of us here at SDPolitics. He is at his best in this piece from the Spectator. He notes the objections of many that Iraq is too demographically complex and artificial to ever make it work as a functional nation, let alone a democracy. The unspoken corollary of this argument is that dictatorship is just the thing for such a place. Steyn argues, to the contrary, that
the artificially cobbled together country is one reason it’s worked so well. The Shia are the biggest group, but, even if they were utterly homogeneous, which they’re not, they’re not so big that they can impose their will easily on the Kurds and the Sunni. When the West’s headless chickens were running around squawking that there were more than a hundred parties on the ballot, it was all going to be one almighty mess, they failed to understand that the design flaw of Iraq is paradoxically its greatest strength: the traditional Arab solution — the local strongman — was not available. Instead, in the run-up to the election and in the month since, we’ve seen various groupings come together, hammer out areas of agreement, reach out to other coalitions, identify compromise positions, etc. — in a word, politics. The sight of eight million Iraqis going to the polls was profoundly moving to their neighbours in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt etc. But it was all the pluralist multi-party smoke-filled-room stuff that caught the fancy of the frustrated political class in those other countries. It would have been possible to find a friendly authoritarian Musharraf type and install him on one of Saddam’s solid gold toilets, but it would have been utterly uninspiring to the world beyond Iraq’s borders. It would have missed the point of the exercise.
This is right out of James Madison's Federalist 10. If you want a republic, a people divided into a multiplicity of interests and sects is better than one that is homogeneous. In the former, the different factions must somehow learn to negotiate with one another, and it is precisely out of such negotiations that a stable democracy can emerge.
I would add one thing to this argument. One fear shared by Middle East strongmen and Western governments alike is that of a militant Islamist revolution. There is no question that this fear has long moved us to turn a blind eye to the "Musharraf types," who, however nasty they may be, were thought to be better than the alternative. But it may be that is precisely the strongmen, and strong Houses (as in House of Saud) who are now realizing that representative government may be their salvation. The radicals are always a small number of the folk even among the most radicalized ethnic groups; in a truly inclusive government, they will be pushed to the fringe. And sooner or later it will break the back of any armed insurgency when it becomes clear that its agenda is not shared even among its very own slice of society.
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