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Worldview | Building democracy without a head start

By Trudy Rubin

There's something particularly apt about my returning from Iraq in time to celebrate July Fourth in Philadelphia. America's independence struggle offers important lessons about the prospects for democracy in Baghdad - and in Kabul.

All the more since Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai receives the prestigious Philadelphia Liberty Medal today at Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed.

There is one aspect of Thomas Jefferson's masterpiece I find particularly striking: the nature of the charges he lays against the British king. Jefferson is most outraged because the monarch wouldn't subject himself to the rule of law.

In other words, Britain already had a long legal tradition that limited its ruler. The rebel leaders - many of them lawyers - were furious that the king wouldn't apply this tradition to the North American colonies. The litany of sins Jefferson ascribes to the monarch includes dissolving legislatures arbitrarily, abusing trials by jury, and taxing without representation.

The thinkers who created our country were fully familiar with the rule-of-law concept because it had developed over centuries in England, dating to the Magna Carta in 1215.

Contrast that with Iraq, where people have lived for decades according to the whim of a dictator. Or Afghanistan, where a largely illiterate population was ruled by the most draconian version of Islamic law in the world.

Iraq does have an educated middle class and some distinguished jurists. But only those who lived in exile have experience with working constitutional systems. In Afghanistan, most of the middle class fled years ago.

Few Iraqis are familiar with the provisions of a transitional constitution written by American and Iraqi-exile lawyers. This constitution is replete with guarantees of minority and women's rights. But it is already being challenged by Shiite religious leaders who fear that minority rights will deprive them of majority power.

Old habits of thinking may take decades to change. Take the trial of Saddam Hussein. Most Iraqis I spoke to seemed to care less about trial by law than that he get the death penalty (except for Sunni nationalists who wanted him freed).

I was also struck by a conversation with Mohammed Ihsan, minister for human rights in the Kurdish regional government, in northern Iraq, who told me about a lecture he gave to the elite of the law faculty in Baghdad.

"One lady doctor [Ph.D.] told me: 'All of us grew up and have been trained in an environment to hate the United States, Jews, and Kurds for the last four decades. Everything you tell us is just in your mind, but tell me how I can forget all I've been trained for.' " Ihsan feared that years of Baathist indoctrination would make it hard for many Iraqis to be tolerant.

When an assembly is elected to write Iraq's permanent constitution, let's hope religious and ethnic groups grasp the concept of power-sharing. The drafters of the Afghan constitution were able to reach compromise on tough issues such as women's rights. But there is a great difference between putting words on paper and enforcing them.

The Bush administration has pointed to the former Soviet Union as proof that democracy can flourish in countries that lived through totalitarianism. But most of the 15 former Soviet republics have reverted to authoritarian rule.

As for Russia itself, the population has clearly tired of nascent democracy. A decade of democracy-building programs backed by the United States left most Russians feeling that a few oligarchs reaped most of the gains. Russia has reverted to a limited autocracy under Vladimir Putin; press freedoms have been curbed, and the courts are cowed. Case in point: the ongoing trial of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His real crime is not tax fraud (as charged) but his audacity in funding opposition political parties. The Russian public is content to have a tough guy in charge who punishes the rich and pays pensions on time.

None of this is to say the United States shouldn't help democrats who are pushing for change. President Karzai - who is supposed to hold elections this fall - needs much more security assistance than the Bush team and NATO have provided so far.

But Americans must understand that democracy can't be bestowed or imposed from above. If Iraqi security remains bad, that country may revert to a strongman as the Russians did.

We should help those Iraqis who seek our help - with elections, civil society and the rest. But we should have no illusions we can mold the Iraqis' path.

And on the Fourth of July we should be grateful. Our founding fathers had 560 years of British legal tradition on which to draw. Those lawyers in Philadelphia didn't have to start from scratch.

(c) 2004 Philadelphia Inquirer and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

Update Posted on: 7/15/2004