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.

Although the U.S. occupation and the CPA's effort to design and foster democracy in Iraq were deeply flawed, there were other, more positive aspects of the story, and these offer real hope for the future. Through various offices and mechanisms including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy, the CPA presided over an ambitious effort to promote pluralist democracy in Iraq. Some financial assistance and technical support was delivered very quickly and sensitively to emerging Iraqi civil society organizations, such as women's groups, youth organizations, professional associations, and think tanks working to expand and stimulate democratic participation. These contributions proved very helpful in some cases, allowing the Iraqi Higher Women's Council, for example, to establish a minimum quota (25 percent) for the representation of women in parliament. Training programs were set up to offer nascent Iraqi political parties the skills and tools needed to organize and mobilize, and energetic and creative CPA officials helped channel this assistance to the right places. The achievements were particularly impressive in Iraq's south-central region, where millions of dollars were spent building a network of 18 Internet-linked local democracy centers (one each for human rights, women, and development in each of six provinces), as well as a regional democracy training center in Hilla that includes a lecture hall, conference room, two state-of-the-art computer rooms, and more than a dozen offices for NGOs. This same assistance helped to build a university for humanistic (and democratic) studies in Hilla, in a gleaming former presidential mosque, complete with a radio station and a vast center for translating works on democracy into Arabic.

Like many CPA officials, I found many Iraqis to have a deep ambition to live in a decent, democratic, and free society and found them prepared to do the hard work that building a democracy will require. Above all else, Iraqis want security: they want to be free from the terror that disfigured their lives under Saddam and that has continued, in a different form, since the war. But most favor achieving this security through democratic means, not under some "benevolent" strongman.

Because of the failures and shortcomings of the occupation-as well as the intrinsic difficulties that any occupation following Saddam's tyranny was bound to confront-it is going to take a number of years to rebuild the Iraqi state and to construct any kind of viable democratic and constitutional order in Iraq. The post-handover transition is going to be long, and initially very bloody. It is not clear that the country is going to be able to conduct reasonably credible elections by next January. And even if those elections are held in a minimally acceptable fashion, it is hard to imagine that the over-ambitious transition timetable for the remainder of 2005 will be kept. Nevertheless, the end of occupation and the transfer of authority to an interim government on June 28 offered at least a chance for a new beginning. And there is no alternative to this transitional program that does not involve one awful scenario or another: civil war, massive renewed repression, the establishment of a safe haven for terrorist organizations-or quite possibly all three.

The transition in Iraq is going to need a huge amount of international assistance-political, economic, and military-for years to come. Hopefully, the U.S. performance will improve now that Iraqis are in charge of their own future. It is going to be costly and it will continue to be frustrating. Yet a large number of courageous Iraqi democrats, many with comfortable alternatives abroad, are betting their lives and their fortunes on the belief that a new and more democratic political order can be developed and sustained in Iraq. The United States owes it to them-and to itself-to continue to help them.