The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

civil society organizations that will multiply rapidly as foreign funding becomes available, sug- gests a healthy pluralism capable of supporting democracy and preventing any one group from imposing its will on the others. But political parties and orga- nizations of civil society are not the only, and possibly not even the major, political forces in Iraq. Kurds have their own state appa- ratus, complete with an army. Individual clerics wield consider- able power, and so do tribal lead- ers. Some of the parties and some of the clerics, fur- thermore, have their own armed militias. Nobody has any clear idea how much support any of the players would receive in free and fair elections, and how much power they would be able to exert by nondemocratic means, be it the issuing of fatwas (religious edicts) or the force of arms. Thus, while political pluralism is undoubtedly a characteristic of today’s Iraq, this plu- ralism is not a guarantee of democracy. Changing Course U.S. plans for exporting democracy to Iraq have evolved considerably since the occupation. In the early phase, even before the war started, the United States envisaged exporting democracy as a ready-made system, in a process analogous to that used in Germany and Japan after World War II. Under a protracted American occupation, American experts would draft the constitution, build up the institutions, and start the process of economic restructuring. When sovereignty was returned to Iraq, at least two years after the begin- ning of the occupation, Iraq would have a well- designed, functioning system in place. Because Americans envisaged a lengthy occupation, Iraqi participation in the running of the country was extremely limited in the first months after the war. The CPA and the military’s civil affairs teams concen- trated their institution-building efforts largely at the local level, setting up councils in all major towns and, somewhat later, in all provinces as well as in neighbor- hoods of the larger cities. With no power and no rev- enue of their own, except what they received in small grants, the councils were essen- tially advisory groups that pro- vided an Iraqi presence along- side the American occupation authorities. In June, the CPA also started discussing the cre- ation of a national-level Iraqi Advisory Council with similar, limited functions. Events soon forced a rethink- ing of the initial plan. With opposition to the U.S. occupa- tion mounting, the Bush admin- istration decided it had to grant Iraqis a greater role immediate- ly, and that it had to speed up the formation of a cred- ible Iraqi government to which sovereignty could be returned. As a first step, the Advisory Council was renamed the Governing Council in an attempt to reas- sure the population that Iraqis were beginning to take responsibility for the running of the country. At the same time, the Bush administration devised a new plan for accelerating the formation of an Iraqi govern- ment. In September, the administration announced that a constitution would be adopted within six months, and that elections would be held in the summer of 2004, allowing the formal return of sovereignty to Iraq well ahead of the U.S. presidential elections. While the CPA still believed that American experts should play a major role in writing the constitution, to help export democratic institutions to Iraq, it also tried to increase Iraqi participation in the process. Toward that end, it asked the Governing Council to form a committee that would devise the process for writing the constitution. The committee could not agree on a process, how- ever, and furthermore concluded that the writing of the constitution would require at least one year. This led the Bush administration to change tack again, reaching an agreement with the Iraqi Governing Council in mid-November on yet another plan for transferring sovereignty to an Iraqi government. Three aspects of this plan are noteworthy. First, it was negotiated with the Governing Council, an unprece- dented recognition that the U.S. could no longer uni- laterally announce plans for Iraq as it had done until then. Second, it proposed a two-stage process to F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 41 Nobody has any clear idea how much support any of the players would receive in free and fair elections, and how much power they would be able to exert by nondemocratic means.