All posts tagged Iraq

No, Pope Francis, this is not World War Three

In the homily to a mass given this morning in Italy, at a monument to 100,000 soldiers killed in World War I, Pope Francis said:

War is madness… Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.

There are a lot of awful things happening around the world, and I appreciate the pope’s advocacy for peace, but this comparison goes too far. Take a look at this chart of battle deaths from armed conflict around the world from 1900 to 2005, from a study by researchers at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (here):

PRIO battle death trends

The chart doesn’t include the past decade, but we don’t need all the numbers in one place to see what a stretch this comparison is. Take Syria’s civil war, which has probably killed more than 150,000 (source) and perhaps as many as 300,000 or more people over the past three years, for an annual death rate of 50,000–100,000. That is a horrifying toll, but it is vastly lower than the annual rates in the several millions that occurred during the World Wars. Put another way, World War II was like 40 to 80 Syrian civil wars at once.

The many other wars of the present do not substantially close this gap. The civil war in Ukraine has killed approximately 3,000 so far (source). More than 2,000 people have died in the fighting associated with Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza this year (source). The resurgent civil war in Iraq dwarfs them both but still remains well below the intensity of the (interconnected) war next door (source). There are more than 20 other armed conflicts ongoing around the world, but most of them are much less lethal than the ones in Syria and Iraq, and their cumulative toll does not even begin to approach the ones that occurred in the World Wars (source).

I sympathize with the Pope’s intentions, but I don’t think that hyperbole is the best way to realize them. Of course, Pope Francis is not alone; we’ve been hearing a lot of this lately. I wonder if violence on the scale of the World Wars now lies so far outside of our lived experience that we simply cannot fathom it. Beyond some level of disorder, things simply become terrible, and all terrible things are alike. I also worry that the fear this apparent availability cascade is producing will drive other governments to react in ways that only make things worse.

6 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on September 13, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Violent Conflict
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on September 13, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/no-pope-francis-this-is-not-world-war-three/

Refugee Flows and Disorder in the Global System

This…

The number of people displaced by violent conflict hit the highest level since World War II at the end of 2013, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, António Guterres, said in a report released on Friday…

Moreover, the impact of conflicts raging this year in Central African Republic, South Sudan, Ukraine and now Iraq threatens to push levels of displacement even higher by the end of 2014, he said.

…is, I think, another manifestation of the trends I discussed in a blog post here last September:

If we think on a systemic scale, it’s easier to see that we are now living through a period of global disorder matched in recent history only by the years surrounding the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and possibly exceeding it. Importantly, it’s not just the spate of state collapses through which this disorder becomes evident, but also the wider wave of protest activity and institutional transformation to which some of those collapses are connected.

If that’s true, then Mr. Guterres is probably right when he predicts that this will get even worse this year, because things still seem to be trending toward disorder. A lot of the transnational activity in response to local manifestations is still deliberately inflammatory (e.g., materiel and cash to rebels in Syria and Iraq, Russian support for separatists in Ukraine), and international efforts to quell some of those manifestations (e.g., UN PKOs in CAR and South Sudan) are struggling. Meanwhile, in what’s probably both a cause and an effect of these processes, global economic growth still has not rebounded as far or as fast as many had expected a year or two ago and remains uncertain and uneven.

In other words, the positive feedback still seems to be outrunning the negative feedback. Until that turns, the systemic processes driving (and being driven by) increased refugee flows will likely continue.

Addendum: The quote at the start of this post contains what I think is an error. A lot of the news stories on this report’s release used phrases like “displaced persons highest since World War II,” so I assumed that the U.N. report included the data on which that statement would be based. It turns out, though, that the report only makes a vague (and arguably misleading) reference to “the post-World War II era.” In fact, the U.N. does not have data to make comparisons on numbers of displaced persons prior to 1989. With the data it does have, the most the UNHCR can say is this, from p. 5: “The 2013 levels of forcible displacement were the highest since at least 1989, the first year that comprehensive statistics on global forced displacement existed.”

The picture also looks a little different from the press release if we adjust for increases in global population. Doing some rough math with the number of displaced persons in this UNHCR chart as the numerator and the U.S. Census Bureau’s mid-year estimates of world population as the denominator, here are some annual statistics on displaced persons as a share of the global population:

1989: 0.65%
1992: 0.84%
2010: 0.63%
2014: 0.72%

In no way do I mean to make light of what’s obviously a massive global problem, but as a share of the global population, the latest numbers are not (yet) even the worst since 1989, the first year for which UNHCR has comparable data.

5 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on June 20, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Complexity Politics, International Relations, Protests and Popular Uprisings, Revolutions, State Collapse, Violent Conflict
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on June 20, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/refugee-flows-and-disorder-in-the-global-system/

A Brief Response to Anne-Marie Slaughter on Iraq and Syria

Anne-Marie Slaughter has an op-ed in today’s New York Times in which she argues that the U.S. government should launch air strikes now against targets in Iraq and Syria as a way to advance America’s and the world’s strategic and humanitarian interests. Here is the crux of the piece:

President Obama should be asking the same question in Iraq and Syria. What course of action will be best, in the short and the long term, for the Iraqi and Syrian people? What course of action will be most likely to stop the violence and misery they experience on a daily basis? What course of action will give them the best chance of peace, prosperity and a decent government?

The answer to those questions may well involve the use of force on a limited but immediate basis, in both countries. Enough force to remind all parties that we can, from the air, see and retaliate against not only Al Qaeda members, whom our drones track for months, but also any individuals guilty of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity. Enough force to compel governments and rebels alike to the negotiating table. And enough force to create a breathing space in which decent leaders can begin to consolidate power.

For the moment, let’s take for granted her assertions about the strategic interests at stake; the U.S.’s responsibility to protect civilians in other countries, by force if necessary; and the propriety of taking such action without prior approval from the U.N. Security Council.

Conceding all of that ground, it’s easier to see that, as a practical matter, Slaughter’s recommendation depends on strong assumptions about the efficacy of the action she proposes. Specifically, she asserts that the U.S. should conduct air strikes (“use of force on a limited but immediate basis,” “from the air”) against targets in Iraq and Syria because doing so will have three main effects:

  1. Deter atrocities (“to remind all parties that we can…see and retaliate against…any individuals guilty of mass atrocities and crimes against humanity”);
  2. Spur talks among warring parties (“to compel governments and rebels alike to the negotiating table”); and
  3. Enable positive political development (“to create a breathing space in which decent leaders can begin to consolidate power”)

If you believe, as Slaughter apparently does, that limited air strikes a) will almost certainly achieve all of these goals and b) will not produce other harmful strategic or humanitarian consequences that could partially offset or even outweigh those gains, then you should probably endorse this policy.

If, however, you are unsure about the ability of limited air strikes on yet-to-be-named targets in Iraq and Syria to accomplish these ends, or about the unintended strategic and humanitarian consequences those strikes could also have, then you should hesitate to support this policy and think through those other possible futures.

9 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on June 18, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Foreign Policy
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on June 18, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/a-brief-response-to-anne-marie-slaughter-on-iraq-and-syria/

Beware the Confident Counterfactual

Did you anticipate the Syrian uprising that began in 2011? What about the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan uprisings that preceded and arguably shaped it? Did you anticipate that Assad would survive the first three years of civil war there, or that Iraq’s civil war would wax again as intensely as it has in the past few days?

All of these events or outcomes were difficult forecasting problems before they occurred, and many observers have been frank about their own surprise at many of them. At the same time, many of those same observers speak with confidence about the causes of those events. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 surely is or is not the cause of the now-raging civil war in that country. The absence of direct US or NATO military intervention in Syria is or is not to blame for continuation of that country’s civil war and the mass atrocities it has brought—and, by extension, the resurgence of civil war in Iraq.

But here’s the thing: strong causal claims require some confidence about how history would have unfolded in the absence of the cause of interest, and those counterfactual histories are no easier to get right than observed history was to anticipate.

Like all of the most interesting questions, what causality means and how we might demonstrate it will forever be matters for debate—see here on Daniel Little’s blog for an overview of that debate’s recent state—but most conceptions revolve around some idea of necessity. When we say X caused Y, we usually mean that had X not occurred, Y wouldn’t have happened, either. Subtler or less stringent versions might center on salience instead of necessity and insert a “probably” into the final phrase of the previous sentence, but the core idea is the same.

In nonexperimental social science, this logic implicitly obliges us to consider the various ways history might have unfolded in response to X’ rather than X. In a sense, then, both prediction and explanation are forecasting problems. They require us to imagine states of the world we have not seen and to connect them in plausible ways to to ones we have. If anything, the counterfactual predictions required for explanation are more frustrating epistemological problems than the true forecasts, because we will never get to see the outcome(s) against which we could assess the accuracy of our guesses.

As Robert Jervis pointed out in his contribution to a 1996 edited volume on counterfactual thought experiments in world politics, counterfactuals are (or should be) especially hard to construct—and thus causal claims especially hard to make—when the causal processes of interest involve systems. For Jervis,

A system exists when elements or units are interconnected so that the system has emergent properties—i.e., its characteristics and behavior canot be inferred from the characteristics and behavior of the units taken individually—and when changes in one unit or the relationship between any two of them produce ramifying alterations in other units or relationships.

As Jervis notes,

A great deal of thinking about causation…is based on comparing two situations that are the same in all ways except one. Any differences in the outcome, whether actual or expected…can be attributed to the difference in the state of the one element…

Under many circumstances, this method is powerful and appropriate. But it runs into serious problems when we are dealing with systems because other things simply cannot be held constant: as Garret Hardin nicely puts it, in a system, ‘we can never do merely one thing.’

Jervis sketches a few thought experiments to drive this point home. He has a nice one about the effects of external interventions on civil wars that is topical here, but I think his New York traffic example is more resonant:

In everyday thought experiments we ask what would have happened if one element in our world had been different. Living in New York, I often hear people speculate that traffic would be unbearable (as opposed to merely terrible) had Robert Moses not built his highways, bridges, and tunnels. But to try to estimate what things would have been like, we cannot merely subtract these structures from today’s Manhattan landscape. The traffic patterns, the location of businesses and residences, and the number of private automobiles that are now on the streets are in significant measure the product of Moses’s road network. Had it not been built, or had it been built differently, many other things would have been different. Traffic might now be worse, but it is also possible that it would have been better because a more efficient public transportation system would have been developed or because the city would not have grown so large and prosperous without the highways.

Substitute “invade Iraq” or “fail to invade Syria” for Moses’s bridges and tunnels, and I hope you see what I mean.

In the end, it’s much harder to get beyond banal observations about influences to strong claims about causality than our story-telling minds and the popular media that cater to them would like. Of course the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the absence of Western military intervention in Syria have shaped the histories that followed. But what would have happened in their absence—and, by implication, what would happen now if, for example, the US now re-inserted its armed forces into Iraq or attempted to topple Assad? Those questions are far tougher to answer, and we should beware of anyone who speaks with great confidence about their answers. If you’re a social scientist who isn’t comfortable making and confident in the accuracy of your predictions, you shouldn’t be comfortable making and confident in the validity of your causal claims, either.

11 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on June 15, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Complexity Politics, Forecasting
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on June 15, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/beware-the-confident-counterfactual/

Early Results from a New Atrocities Early Warning System

For the past couple of years, I have been working as a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide to help build a new early-warning system for mass atrocities around the world. Six months ago, we started running the second of our two major forecasting streams, a “wisdom of (expert) crowds” platform that aggregates probabilistic forecasts from a pool of topical and area experts on potential events of concern. (See this conference paper for more detail.)

The chart below summarizes the output from that platform on most of the questions we’ve asked so far about potential new episodes of mass killing before 2015. For our early-warning system, we define a mass killing as an episode of sustained violence in which at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians from a discrete group are intentionally killed, usually in a period of a year or less. Each line in the chart shows change over time in the daily average of the inputs from all of the participants who choose to make a forecast on that question. In other words, the line is a mathematical summary of the wisdom of our assembled crowd—now numbering nearly 100—on the risk of a mass killing beginning in each case before the end of 2014. Also:

  • Some of the lines (e.g., South Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan) start further to the right than others because we did not ask about those cases when the system launched but instead added them later, as we continue to do.
  • Two lines—Central African Republic and South Sudan—end early because we saw onsets of mass-killing episodes in those countries. The asterisks indicate the dates on which we made those declarations and therefore closed the relevant questions.
  • Most but not all of these questions ask specifically about state-led mass killings, and some focus on specific target groups (e.g., the Rohingya in Burma) or geographic regions (the North Caucasus in Russia) as indicated.
Crowd-Estimated Probabilities of Mass-Killing Onset Before 1 January 2015

Crowd-Estimated Probabilities of Mass-Killing Onset Before 1 January 2015

I look at that chart and conclude that this process is working reasonably well so far. In the six months since we started running this system, the two countries that have seen onsets of mass killing are both ones that our forecasters promptly and consistently put on the high side of 50 percent. Nearly all of the other cases, where mass killings haven’t yet occurred this year, have stuck on the low end of the scale.

I’m also gratified to see that the system is already generating the kind of dynamic output we’d hoped it would, even with fewer than 100 forecasters in the pool. In the past several weeks, the forecasts for both Burma and Iraq have risen sharply, apparently in response to shifts in relevant policies in the former and the escalation of the civil war in the latter. Meanwhile, the forecast for Uighurs in China has risen steadily over the year as a separatist rebellion in Xinjiang Province has escalated and, with it, concerns about a harsh government response. These inflection points and trends can help identify changes in risk that warrant attention from organizations and individuals concerned about preventing or mitigating these potential atrocities.

Finally, I’m also intrigued to see that our opinion pool seems to be sorting cases into a few clusters that could be construed as distinct tiers of concern. Here’s what I have in mind:

  • Above the 50-percent threshold are the high risk cases, where forecasters assess that mass killing is likely to occur during the specified time frame.  These cases won’t necessarily be surprising. Some observers had been warning on the risk of mass atrocities in CAR and South Sudan for months before those episodes began, and the plight of the Rohingya in Burma has been a focal point for many advocacy groups in the past year. Even in supposedly “obvious” cases, however, this system can help by providing a sharper estimate of that risk and giving a sense of how it is trending over time. In the case of Burma, for example, it is the separation that has happened in the last several weeks that tells the story of a switch from possible to likely and thus adds a degree of urgency to that warning.
  • A little farther down the y-axis are the moderate risk cases—ones that probably won’t suffer mass killing during the period in question but could more readily tip in that direction. In the chart above, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burundi all land in this tier, although Iraq now appears to be sliding into the high risk group.
  • Clustered toward the bottom are the low risk cases where the forecasters seem fairly confident that mass killing will not occur in the near future. In the chart above, Russia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia are the cases that land firmly in this set. China (Uighurs) remains closer to them than the moderate risk tier, but it appears to be creeping toward the moderate-risk group. We are also running a question about the risk of state-led mass killing in Rwanda before 2015, and it currently lands in this tier, with a forecast of 14 percent.

The system that generates the data behind this chart is password protected, but the point of our project is to make these kinds of forecasts freely available to the global public. We are currently building the web site that will display the forecasts from this opinion pool in real time to all comers and hope to have it ready this fall.

In the meantime, if you think you have relevant knowledge or expertise—maybe you study or work on this topic, or maybe you live or work in parts of the world where risks tend to be higher—and are interested in volunteering as a forecaster, please send an email to us at ewp@ushmm.org.

3 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on May 19, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Mass Atrocities
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on May 19, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/early-results-from-a-new-atrocities-early-warning-system/

Alarmed By Iraq

Iraq’s long-running civil war has spread and intensified again over the past year, and the government’s fight against a swelling Sunni insurgency now threatens to devolve into the sort of indiscriminate reprisals that could produce a new episode of state-led mass killing there.

The idea that Iraq could suffer a new wave of mass atrocities at the hands of state security forces or sectarian militias collaborating with them is not far fetched. According to statistical risk assessments produced for our atrocities early-warning project (here), Iraq is one of the 10 countries worldwide most susceptible to an onset of state-led mass killing, bracketed by places like Syria, Sudan, and the Central African Republic where large-scale atrocities and even genocide are already underway.

Of course, Iraq is already suffering mass atrocities of its own at the hands of insurgent groups who routinely kill large numbers of civilians in indiscriminate attacks, every one of which would stun American or European publics if it happened there. According to the widely respected Iraq Body Count project, the pace of civilian killings in Iraq accelerated sharply in July 2013 after a several-year lull of sorts in which “only” a few hundred civilians were dying from violence each month. Since the middle of last year, the civilian toll has averaged more than 1,000 fatalities per month. That’s well off the pace of 2006-2007, the peak period of civilian casualties under Coalition occupation, but it’s still an astonishing level of violence.

Monthly Counts of Civilian Deaths from Violence in Iraq (Source: Iraq Body Count)

Monthly Counts of Civilian Deaths from Violence in Iraq (Source: Iraq Body Count)

What seems to be increasing now is the risk of additional atrocities perpetrated by the very government that is supposed to be securing civilians against those kinds of attacks. A Sunni insurgency is gaining steam, and the government, in turn, is ratcheting up its efforts to quash the growing threat to its power in worrisome ways. A recent Reuters story summarized the current situation:

In Buhriz and other villages and towns encircling the capital, a pitched battle is underway between the emboldened Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the extremist Sunni group that has led a brutal insurgency around Baghdad for more than a year, and Iraqi security forces, who in recent months have employed Shi’ite militias as shock troops.

And this anecdote from the same Reuters story shows how that battle is sometimes playing out:

The Sunni militants who seized the riverside town of Buhriz late last month stayed for several hours. The next morning, after the Sunnis had left, Iraqi security forces and dozens of Shi’ite militia fighters arrived and marched from home to home in search of insurgents and sympathizers in this rural community, dotted by date palms and orange groves.

According to accounts by Shi’ite tribal leaders, two eyewitnesses and politicians, what happened next was brutal.

“There were men in civilian clothes on motorcycles shouting ‘Ali is on your side’,” one man said, referring to a key figure in Shi’ite tradition. “People started fleeing their homes, leaving behind the elders and young men and those who refused to leave. The militias then stormed the houses. They pulled out the young men and summarily executed them.”

Sadly, this escalatory spiral of indiscriminate violence is not uncommon in civil wars. Ben Valentino, a collaborator of mine in the development of this atrocities early-warning project, has written extensively on this topic (see especially here , here, and here). As Ben explained to me via email,

The relationship between counter-insurgency and mass violence against civilians is one of the most well-established findings in the social science literature on political violence. Not all counter-insurgency campaigns lead to mass killing, but when insurgent groups become large and effective enough to seriously threaten the government’s hold on power and when the rebels draw predominantly on local civilians for support, the risks of mass killing are very high. Usually, large-scale violence against civilians is neither the first nor the only tactic that governments use to defeat insurgencies. They may try to focus operations primarily against armed insurgents, or even offer positive incentives to civilians who collaborate with the government. But when less violent methods fail, the temptation to target civilians in the effort to defeat the rebels increases.

Right now, it’s hard to see what’s going to halt or reverse this trend in Iraq. “Things can get much worse from where we are, and more than likely they will,” Daniel Serwer told IRIN News for a story on Iraq’s escalating conflict (here). Other observers quoted in the same story seemed to think that conflict fatigue would keep the conflict from ballooning further, but that hope is hard to square with the escalation of violence that has already occurred over the past year and the fact that Iraq’s civil war never really ended.

In theory, elections are supposed to be a brake on this process, giving rival factions opportunities to compete for power and influence state policy in nonviolent ways. In practice, this often isn’t the case. Instead, Iraq appears to be following the more conventional path in which election winners focus on consolidating their own power instead of governing well, and excluded factions seek other means to advance their interests. Here’s part of how the New York Times set the scene for this week’s elections, which incumbent prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s coalition is apparently struggling to win:

American intelligence assessments have found that Mr. Maliki’s re-election could increase sectarian tensions and even raise the odds of a civil war, citing his accumulation of power, his failure to compromise with other Iraqi factions—Sunni or Kurd—and his military failures against Islamic extremists. On his watch, Iraq’s American-trained military has been accused by rights groups of serious abuses as it cracks down on militants and opponents of Mr. Maliki’s government, including torture, indiscriminate roundups of Sunnis and demands of bribes to release detainees.

Because Iraq ranked so high in our last statistical risk assessments, we posted a question about it a few months ago on our “wisdom of (expert) crowds” forecasting system. Our pool of forecasters is still relatively small—89 as I write this—but the ones who have weighed in on this topic so far have put it in what I see as a middle tier of concern, where the risk is seen as substantial but not imminent or inevitable. Since January, the pool’s estimated probability of an onset of state-led mass killing in Iraq in 2014 has hovered around 20 percent, alongside countries like Pakistan (23 percent), Bangladesh (20 percent), and Burundi (19 percent) but well behind South Sudan (above 80 percent since December) and Myanmar (43 percent for the risk of a mass killing targeting the Rohingya in particular).

Notably, though, the estimate for Iraq has ticked up a few notches in the past few days to 27 percent as forecasters (including me) have read and discussed some of the pre-election reports mentioned here. I think we are on to something that deserves more scrutiny than it appears to be getting.

6 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on April 30, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Forecasting, Mass Atrocities, Violent Conflict
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on April 30, 2014

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/alarmed-by-iraq/

A Notable Year of the Wrong Kind

The year that’s about to end has distinguished itself in at least one way we’d prefer never to see again. By my reckoning, 2013 saw more new mass killings than any year since the early 1990s.

When I say “mass killing,” I mean any episode in which the deliberate actions of state agents or other organizations kill at least 1,000 noncombatant civilians from a discrete group. Mass killings are often but certainly not always perpetrated by states, and the groups they target may be identified in various ways, from their politics to their ethnicity, language, or religion. Thanks to my colleague Ben Valentino, we have a fairly reliable tally of episodes of state-led mass killing around the world since the mid-1940s. Unfortunately, there is no comparable reckoning of mass killings carried out by non-state actors—nearly always rebel groups of some kind—so we can’t make statements about counts and trends as confidently as I would like. Still, we do the best we can with the information we have.

With those definitions and caveats in mind, I would say that in 2013 mass killings began:

Of course, even as these new cases have developed, episodes of mass killings have continued in a number of other places:

In a follow-up post I hope to write soon, I’ll offer some ideas on why 2013 was such a bad year for deliberate mass violence against civilians. In the meantime, if you think I’ve misrepresented any of these cases here or overlooked any others, please use the Comments to set me straight.

8 Comments
by Jay Ulfelder on December 26, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Mass Atrocities, Violent Conflict
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on December 26, 2013

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/a-banner-year-of-the-wrong-kind/

Don’t Blame al-Maliki’s Authoritarian “Turn” on the Departure of U.S. Troops

It’s easy to look at recent events in Iraq and conclude that the withrdawal of U.S. combat troops caused Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to act like an autocrat, because it’s exactly the kind of proximate cause-effect story our brains are wired to concoct. It’s easy, but it’s wrong. Al-Maliki already was an autocrat, and the same U.S. troop presence that led to the establishment of the current Iraqi republic had already proven incapable of preventing the prime minister from consolidating his power.

It’s hard to say with confidence whether or not the Iraqi regime constructed after the invasion of 2003 ever was a full-blown democracy, but it certainly came close enough to warrant consideration. In spite of the violence and intimidation, the elections of 2005 were competitive and inclusive, the votes seem to have been tallied properly, and civil liberties were broad enough to let citizens listen, read, meet, and talk about their choices and expectations.

The parliamentary elections of 2010 were a different story. In the run-up to those contests, a panel appointed by al-Maliki’s government disqualified more than 500 candidates, including prominent politicians allied with Maliki rival Ayad Allawi, for their alleged ties to the Ba’ath party that ruled under Saddam Hussein. Human Rights Watch at the time called the disqualifications “unfair and arbitrary,” and they were widely viewed as a partisan act intended to hobble Sunni challenges to the prime minister’s ruling Shi’ite coalition. After the elections had apparently still produced a narrow two-seat advantage for Allawi’s bloc over al-Maliki’s, a special elections court, working in secret and under continued pressure from the commission that disqualified alleged Ba’athists ahead of the balloting, issued rulings that erased Allawi’s advantage and opened the door for al-Maliki to retain the post of prime minister. Meanwhile, even before the 2010 elections were being contorted to ensure that al-Maliki retained power, the prime minister’s government was reportedly using secret prisons and elements of the state security forces to harrass and intimidate political rivals.

In short, even if Iraq’s national government was more or less democratic after elections in 2005, that democracy had already been twisted back into authoritarian rule by the time al-Maliki returned to his post as prime minister after the elections of 2010.

It’s tempting to look at the distortion of Iraq’s first democratic experiment and conclude that the country’s sectarian divisions doom it to dictatorship and violence. In fact, the path Iraq has followed under al-Maliki’s leadership is utterly conventional. As I’ve noted before on this blog, most attempts at democracy are ended by a reassertion of authoritarian rule; in the past half-century, very few countries have managed to make democracy stick on their first try. Since the end of the Cold War, the most common path back to autocracy has been the creeping executive coup, whereby the incumbent party uses the levers of state authority to ensure its continuation in office. The winners of the elections that mark the start of a democratic episode usually don’t try to consolidate their advantage right away, however. Instead, these authoritarian tendencies usually creep in as new elections approach and threaten the incumbents with a loss of power. Comparatively speaking, then, Iraq’s first democratic experiment may have been a bit shorter than most, but the path it followed and end it met were utterly predictable from the start, and that predictability has nothing to do with Iraq’s long history of sectarian rivalry.

Given these facts, it’s impossible to blame the failure of Iraq’s attempt at democracy on the Obama administration’s decision to complete the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. For one thing, there’s the simple problem of the order of those events in time. If Iraq’s democratic experiment ended nearly two years before U.S. troops finished withdrawing, that end can’t really be a consequence of that withdrawal, can it?

Proponents of a longer mission might argue that the expectation of American withdrawal was the real problem, and democracy could have taken firmer root in Iraq had it just been given more time to mature under the indefinite protection of American forces. The trouble with this argument is that it ignores what the Iraqi government was saying about its own desire for a U.S. exit. Once the Iraqi government had decided not to invite American combat troops to stay on, any failure to remove those troops would have amounted to a renewed occupation, and any direct interference in Iraqi politics by American soldiers or diplomats would have abrogated the democratic principles it might have been meant to defend.

In sum, the renewal of authoritarian rule in Iraq is another sad but predictable turn for a country that’s suffered an awful lot of them. At the end of a year that’s been especially hard on entrenched dictators, it’s tempting to imagine what other pathways Iraq might have followed if the American-led invasion of 2003 had never happened. We can’t know, of course, but history suggests that the outcome of Iraq’s first attempt at democracy would likely have been the same, no matter what the timing and catalyst.

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by Jay Ulfelder on December 23, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Democratic Breakdown
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Posted by Jay Ulfelder on December 23, 2011

https://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/dont-blame-al-malikis-authoritarian-turn-on-the-departure-of-u-s-troops/

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