Watching Iraq’s Parliament debate an election law last week, inside a conference center still decorated with mosaics of Saddam Hussein’s wartime delusions, ought to have been reassuring to those who wish the country’s nascent democracy well. It wasn’t.
The impasse over the election — which is now almost certain to slip past a constitutional deadline set for January — has laid bare more than Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian fissures, which simmer never far from the surface. It has also exposed the unfinished business of building a democratic system, just as the United States begins to wrap up its military mission, and with it much of America’s influence.
As the Obama administration prepares to unveil a new set of “benchmarks” to measure political progress in Afghanistan — and to prod President Hamid Karzai to improve governance there as he anticipates more troops from America — Iraq’s experience can serve as a cautionary tale.
Much of what has stalled the election law stems from the failure to achieve the same sort of benchmarks, which Congress imposed when President Bush ordered a “surge” of American forces here in 2007 to stanch an incipient civil war.
Adopting legislation to knit the country together; reforming the Constitution; strengthening independent security forces; reconciling Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — all were benchmarks, and all remain partly or wholly unmet, despite the security gains that were supposed to create the space for political progress and thus peace.
Instead, Iraqis treat their Constitution — like the benchmarks — the way they treat what few traffic lights operate here.
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