Hard knocks and hopes for Iraqi democratisation

Iraqi exile and renowned author Kanan Makiya concedes that the thesis that democratization in Iraq has so far translated only into elections, not the rule of law and what he calls the first stages of what amounts to a kind of confessional cleansing of parts of Baghdad and he says that We are on the edge of a chasm from which we can still step back. It is a dangerous moment, but not yet hopeless.

He says that The battle of ideas has only just begun. We have a long way to go. But one can feel, among young Arabs in particular, that finally the region is on the move. Of course, we can’t predict the outcome. The Iraqi elections have produced a National Assembly that is, after much procrastination, in the end creating a government. And they produced a document, the new, albeit incomplete and faulty, permanent constitution of Iraq, that wrestles with the question of what it means to be an Iraqi.

He argues that the insurgency has no chance of winning; it has no program to which to win people over. He concludes that while it will be a long time before Iraq is a democracy as we understand that word, we can say a few things about the new Iraq that is being born. It will not threaten or attack its neighbors; it will be a greatly decentralized state; and it will represent a new regional model of statehood and nation-formation, one that in all likelihood offers its citizens a variety of lifestyles and models to choose from within the very same Iraq that once knew only the totalizing Arabism of the Baath.

(Hat Tip - Normblog)