Pain, pretty women and democracy in Iraq

Attack Iraq” propagandists yammer most about weapons of mass destruction (a serious but containable concern) and hardly at all about oil (the real Bush deal). Somewhere between – usually phrased as a pious sidebar – is the fond hope for democracy in Islam’s most brutally governed country. Never having been to Baghdad, I lack first-hand perspective on the prospects for worthy reform. My bet on democracy’s chances in Iraq is based instead on two 1995 encounters – first with pain, then with a pretty woman. (Personal note: For once in an amorous, dolorous life, the two did not go together.)

Both events occurred in Jordan, just south of Iraq on the crazy quilt Middle East map bequeathed us by post-World War I “peace treaties.” Arbitrarily concocted like Iraq, Jordan owes its comparative political civility to sheer luck in leadership. Its House of Hashem, which dates back to Mohammed, provides Jordan with the most benign of Arab dictatorships. King Hussein and now his successor Abdullah have been remarkable in serving their subjects more than abusing them. As such – and while still bottom-line dictatorial – the Hashemite rulers of Jordan have found Western favor and welcomed Western scholars. I spent June 1995 digging with a Brown University team at Petra, the “rose-red city lost in time.” Apparently I dug too hard. The pain hit me late one night in my right ankle: an agonizing re-fracture.

Come dawn, Brown’s then vice-chancellor drove me to the rudimentary kleeneek (clinic) in Wadi Musa (Valley of Moses) where, surprisingly, an Iraqi doctor held forth. Clearly skilled and speaking good English, he X-rayed the ankle while I told him of having first broken it in Afghanistan years earlier. “That’s my story,” I said as the doctor molded a wet plaster cast. “What’s yours? How come an Iraqi of your background is here in Wadi Musa?”

Pain concentrates memory, and I remember his response verbatim. “During your 1991 war,” he said, “a lot of our soldiers fled. What could they do? You were too strong. For them, it was run or get killed. They ran. Later Saddam’s people arrested them. I had been pressed into service as an army doctor. Some of those who ran were given to me. Saddam’s people told me to amputate their ears. That way, Iraqis would learn by example not to run next time.”

The room went quiet. Plaster casts take a while to dry. The vice-chancellor and I looked at each other, then heard the punch line. “I hesitated,” the doctor said, “and so Saddam’s people repeated the order and gave me three choices: Chop the ears, report to prison myself or pay $25,000 for an exit visa to leave the country. Somehow I found the $25,000.”

And so there he was: exiled without family, friends or funds in Wadi Musa. “I was lucky to find this place,” he said. “I’m lucky to be alive.” What struck me was his lack of anger or indignation. Not even blame. He’d been abused by Saddam for not abusing Saddam’s subjects. But it was nothing special, nothing new. On the contrary, I later realized, it was just the way things were and always had been.

New Year’s tip to would-be democratizers of Iraq (and other coincidentally oil-rich countries): Read the last chapter of Charles Lindholm’s “The Islamic Middle East.” Its 12 pages contain political maxims from all across the region. From Pakistan on the Indus: “Where there is the sound of a blow, there is respect.” From Morocco on the Atlantic: “Starve your dog, and it will follow you.” From Baghdad in the middle: “If you are an anvil, suffer – if you are a stick make someone suffer.” Lindholm summarizes the common message: “The depredations of power-holders [are] regarded not as reprehensible acts but as rational and normal.”

Once free of the cast – but not, in this lifetime, of the cracked ankle – I flew to Saudi Arabia and then Syria. Both were and are absolute dictatorships. Both doubtless figure in the current Washington democracy-petroleum fantasy: Give the people representative government, and they’ll gratefully provide us their oil. As my 1995 trip ended, back in Jordan before the night flight back home, I was jotting notes at dusk in a park when the pretty woman appeared.

Like pain, sudden beauty fixates the mind, especially in the Middle East where it’s seldom publicly seen. Raven hair, green eyes, olive skin, you guess the rest – she had it all. “Do you speak English?” she asked. “May I sit down? Are you an American?” Dumbstruck and quickly beset by fantasies (unrelated to democracy or petroleum), I simply nodded. But Orientalist romance was not to be. To my dismay, she turned her back and announced to the park, “He’s an American.” I found myself surrounded by two dozen politically canny Iraqi exiles.

Most were women in Western dress, several of them stunning. The men, they told me, were hobnobbing in bars and coffeehouses. Grandparents were baby-sitting the kids. Late afternoon was the time for women to mingle outdoors. They’d done so back in Baghdad, before 1991. Then, for various reasons having to do with the war, they and their families were forced to leave. What did I think of Desert Storm and of the sanctions that followed?

I put forth my American outline of events. They countered with an Iraqi version: How Kuwait had once formed part of what now is Iraq; how U.S. ambassador April Glaspie had signaled a sense of Washington non-interference to Saddam Hussein before he invaded; how post-war sanctions were hurting ordinary Iraqis but not their leadership. “Maybe so,” I said, “but let’s talk about your leadership. What about Saddam? He’s a monster. How can you tolerate him?”

Green eyes looked deeply, but not dreamily, into mine. Alas, her passion was strictly political. “Yes, he is a monster,’ she said, “but we don’t – as you say – ‘tolerate’ him. We fear and endure him.” Heads nodded around her. “If not him, it would be someone like him, maybe even worse. We Arabs, we so-called Iraqis, are cursed. We simply can’t govern ourselves.”

A frequent but insomniac flier, I made these notes on the long plane ride back home: “Iraq incapable of democratic self-governance … consequence of arbitrary borders and ethnic diversity … also no concept of nation-state in Islamic doctrine … also oil which (unlike Afghanistan) provides ruler with resources for wholesale tyranny.” (For a comparison of political dynamics in Afghanistan and Iraq, see “Two Bad Hands Played Differently” in this column Oct. 27, 2001.)

Charles Lindholm deepens this analysis as follows: Islam’s extreme egalitarianism – all humans absolutely equal before God – is accordingly competitive in the extreme. (If all are equal, power is forever up for grabs.) The positive flip side is that equality also implies “democracy” which, in fact, functions well (at least for males) in small-scale contexts. “Everywhere, Middle Eastern men from both the city and the countryside have traditionally met in local assemblies to weigh issues, debate, contend, and make collective decisions about their affairs.” Tradition and custom provide necessary ground rules, keep competitive egalitarianism from running amok.

But newly devised nation-states lack time-honored, constraining institutions. Instead they suffer from imposed borders, quarreling ethnicities, and secular hierarchies – all antithetical to the Muslim communal ideal. As such, writes Lindholm, tyranny becomes the norm when politics shift from local to national. “In the Middle East the realm of citizenship and the realm of the state are mutually exclusive – the practice of democratic action is only possible as long as the state is excluded.” His conclusion: “The only course out of this political quagmire is a slow process of gradual democratization and open debate, demonstrating to the people that the state is indeed their servant, not the instrument of their ruler….”

That’s what’s happening, optimistically, in Afghanistan. Note the words “slow” and “gradual.” Also note A) how fitful the Afghan progress, and B) how absent the Afghan oil. Given the infinitely greater petro-stakes in Iraq, what hope is there for a process of gradualism and openness? Much more likely is another brutal round of winner-take-all.

So don’t fall for “Attack Iraq” as a means towards Iraqi democratization. Instead ask this question: How long will the new brutal winners – whom we’ll help install and then support as we once supported Saddam – choose to support us in turn?

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.