What Went Wrong in Iraq

Larry Diamond

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004

Summary:  Although the early U.S. blunders in the occupation of Iraq are well known, their consequences are just now becoming clear. The Bush administration was never willing to commit the resources necessary to secure the country and did not make the most of the resources it had. U.S. officials did get a number of things right, but they never understood-or even listened to-the country they were seeking to rebuild. As a result, the democratic future of Iraq now hangs in the balance.

Larry Diamond is Co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. From January to April 2004, he served as a Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

The occupation pursued a variety of other strategies to fill the legitimacy void, with varying degrees of success. In each of Iraq's 18 provinces, and in most of its cities and larger towns, local coalition military commands, sometimes working with U.S. civilian contractors, formed representative councils through a mix of consultative and deliberative processes. In a few cases, particularly in the far south under British civil and military administration, rough-and-ready elections were organized using the crude method of the ration card system, which registered only Iraqi households, not individuals, but was believed to cover about 90 percent of the population. Officials in Basra province (containing the country's second-largest city) wanted to experiment with direct elections for local councils, but this and other democratic initiatives were vetoed by CPA headquarters, which feared that any example of direct elections would undermine the CPA's insistence that direct elections could not be organized anytime soon. There was also a fear of what elections would produce. As one British official lamented to me, the "CPA [officials] didn't want anything to happen that they didn't control-and this has been impossible to hide from the Iraqis."

The most intractable and debilitating problem with the councils was not their lack of an electoral mandate, however. Indeed, CPA teams worked hard to remove their most corrupt and unrepresentative figures and bring in new faces representing as many groups as possible. In many cases, this process amounted to indirect elections. Rather, the problem with the councils was their evident powerlessness and lack of resources; in some cases, council members had to wait for months to receive their salaries. By failing to invest these councils with real resources and authority, the occupation missed a key opportunity to increase its legitimacy

After three months of costly delay, in July 2003 the occupation did constitute an indigenous national authority, albeit only an advisory one: the Iraqi Governing Council (GC). This body included the representatives of some obviously weighty Iraqi constituencies and political forces, including the two main Kurdish parties (the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), which had ruled the autonomous Kurdish region since its effective liberation from Saddam's tyranny in 1991; two major Shiite political parties, sciri and Dawa; and some older parties (including the communists). Also included were figures close to Ayatollah Sistani and representatives of Iraq's other social forces, including its crucially important tribes.

The GC was not bad as a first step, but it was hobbled by serious flaws. First was the image problem caused by the inclusion of too many controversial Iraqi exiles, particularly Chalabi, in widely visible and powerful roles. Second, the CPA failed to move rapidly enough toward the creation of a more representative and legitimate body. And third, it failed to encourage GC members to reach out and develop constituencies. During its tenure, it was not uncommon for the majority of the council to be out of the country at any given time. Most Iraqis never saw any of the council members. As a group, the GC did not distinguish itself.

The U.S. occupation officials also had a serious legitimacy problem with the international community. Having invaded Iraq without UN Security Council authorization or the support of most other democratic publics in the world, the United States was unable to convince many countries to take a meaningful role in the occupation, something that could have blunted suspicions of the coalition.

Even with that handicap, the UN did establish a fairly significant mission in Baghdad with the arrival on June 2, 2003, of Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of its best, most experienced peace-builders. Despite the UN's questionable reputation in Iraq (a legacy of its involvement with the sanctions program), de Mello and his team were respected by Iraqis and quickly grasped the need for much more substantial Iraqi participation in postwar governance, including the need for the early establishment of an Iraqi interim government.

Unfortunately, the UN's impact on the CPA never extended beyond a few cosmetic changes. This was due in part to the tragic events of August 19, 2003, when terrorists (probably al Qaeda members working with former Baathists) blew up the poorly protected UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing de Mello and more than a dozen other UN staffers and ultimately driving the UN out of Iraq. The attack was one of the worst tragedies the UN has ever suffered as an institution and will shape its thinking about and engagement in conflicts for many years to come.

Even before the attack, however, Washington-and Bremer, in Baghdad-proved unwilling to surrender any significant measure of control to the UN. The CPA leadership did not see a real need for the UN mission, other than to issue an occasional supportive press release. Even when de Mello, after meeting at length with Ayatollah Sistani, went to Bremer in mid-June to warn that a political bomb was about to explode-in the form of a fatwa from Sistani insisting that any constitution-making body for Iraq had to be popularly elected-Bremer dismissed the warning.

The obsession with control was an overarching flaw in the U.S. occupation from start to finish. In any postconflict international intervention, there is always a certain tension between legitimacy and control. Yet for most of the first year of occupation, the U.S. administration opted for the latter whenever the tradeoff presented itself.

That pattern began to change only when the November 15, 2003, "agreement" for political transition quickly unraveled and the administration finally turned to the UN for help. But it should have done so earlier. Washington's legitimacy deficit was so huge that it should have tried, as soon as Garner was replaced in May 2003, to give the UN overall or co-equal responsibility with the CPA for administering postwar Iraq and managing the political transition. It is not clear that the UN would have accepted such a formally elevated role, but at the very least de Mello should have been given much more authority and responsibility.