The dangers of democracy

How autocratic should America be in imposing constitutional liberalism in Iraq?

I don't think the United States needs to be autocratic. It has to provide order. If you think about it, the best recipe I can imagine is James Madison's recipe for our own government. When thinking about the American Constitution he said very famously in "Federalist No. 51" that when constructing a government, you have to do two things. First, the government has to control the governed, and then it has to control itself.

In Iraq, what the United States has to do is create order and then begin building the institutions of liberty -- constitutions, courts, power sharing -- before it gets to the hurly-burly of political contests in elections. It's not that you have to be autocratic, you just have to get the sequence right.

But in the short term, America needs to work with Iraqis, and those most committed to building the institutions of liberty might be exiles who would have to be foisted on an unwilling public.

We should do what we seem to be beginning to do, which is to create a broad-based and therefore legitimate group of Iraqis who would begin the discussions about what kind of political system they want. In the meanwhile, while those discussions are going on, authority will largely have to be wielded by the coalition. You're right in that sense -- one can call it autocratic. It's simply common sense that you cannot devolve power to the factions that are at the very moment deciding what kind of political system to put in place.

One lesson of the Balkans was that if you begin the power contest before you build the institutions, everything goes awry because people who are voted into office suddenly lose interest in the rule of law, clean administration and limitations on governmental authority. It's much easier to construct a fair system when you don't know whether you're going to be the ruler or the ruled, because you will have an incentive to create a fair and balanced system.

During that period, the United States will have to wield authority in conjunction with others and with as much international legitimacy as it can muster. That is why the United States should be internationalizing this process as much as possible.

But aren't there dangers in the United States wielding authority for too long? There have already been protests about the town meetings the United States has been holding to identify Iraqi leaders it can work with. People are protesting a sustained American presence in Iraq.

With regard to these protests, you have to weather some of this. Remember, there were a few hundred people protesting. This is what democracy is all about. We have no idea how representative they were. When you invite 100 or 200 people to a national conference, you are not inviting 100 or 200, and the easiest charge for the excluded is going to be U.S. imperialism. My solution to this is that you don't therefore go away, you therefore internationalize the process more.

A multilateral body has been running Bosnia for six years. The U.N. has been running Kosovo for almost as long. Nobody is calling that colonialism. They call it international assistance.

But is there any hope of the Bush administration agreeing to internationalize the process? So far, it's shut the U.N. out.

I think there's no chance in the short term because the administration is set on its course, but things have a way of changing. We were not going to provide security 50 miles outside Kabul, and then it became clear that that position was untenable, that Hamid Karzai's government in Afghanistan was vulnerable to collapse if we didn't provide security, so we changed course. Who knows what things will look like two or three months from now.

What should the role of Iraq's Islamists be in shaping the new Iraqi government?

They should have a role, they should be included, but I think we should be pushing very strongly for the idea that the system of government that is put in place is one that has all kinds of rights and protections, for example for women, so that even if they were to come to power, the Islamists would not be able to adopt a reactionary attitude towards women. It would be impossible to modernize Iraq if you were to not put in place some of the basic protections of human rights and separation of powers. Let [the Islamists] come in for sure, but vigorously use all the influence we have to ensure that they are not able to create an Islamic state. I don't think they would be able to do so anyway -- most Iraqis are quite secular.

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