Democracy Could Unleash the Great Potential of Iraq

There’s a question that people everywhere should ask about Iraq: How can this country’s future be different from its past, and what can the world do to help create that better future?

Because Iraq today, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein remains in power, is a tyranny in its last stages. The dictatorship may not depart immediately, but if the world keeps the pressure on, it will depart.

Iraq, it should not be forgotten, is a place of enormous potential and has been since the dawn of time when agriculture began on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Modern Iraq is blessed with water and with oil reserves perhaps as large as those of Saudi Arabia.

It has human potential. Many of its 17 million people are educated and capable of building a modern society. Women hold good jobs and have fared better here than in many countries of the Middle East.

This country could be a business leader, as well as a political leader, in the Middle East.

Yet Iraq also is a killing ground, not because of the Gulf War or even the eight-year Iraq-Iran war, but because of internal strife. Rebellions against Saddam Hussein’s government after the Gulf War were brutally put down. The sufferings of the Kurds in the north are well known to the world’s television viewers.

But there were no television cameras in the south, where local people killed officials of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath party and the Iraqi army’s Republican Guards retaliated in fury, killing thousands and bulldozing cities.

The crushing of that rebellion in the south, say knowledgeable people here, means a new revolt won’t be quick to start.

The country today is quiet but tense, and suffering economic hardship. Economic sanctions have continued since last August, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Goods are being smuggled in but prices are going up, and people are selling household goods to raise cash. Sadly, women are selling the jewelry from their dowries, which in the Middle East means a family’s life savings.

How did a country of such potential get this way? Iraq’s story is typical of 20th-Century Third World development, of village people rebelling against the injustice of old systems but failing to find new ones.

Under the monarchy appointed by the departing British colonial power after World War II, wealthy landowners used government for their own ends, and the people got little. So military officers from rural villages overthrew the king in 1958, and that began a series of coups that ended with power in the hands of Saddam Hussein.

Now 54 years old, Hussein was born in a mud-walled house in a village 100 miles north of Baghdad. Hussein was able to get an education and become involved in revolutionary politics. When Hussein came to power, he planned to change society. He spurred education--more than half of all Iraq’s children go to secondary school. When oil income increased in 1973, he expanded social benefits. Aiming to build a modern state, Hussein’s government abolished many restrictions on women.

But oil money made things too easy. Hussein embarked on self-glorification schemes, rebuilding ancient Babylon and putting his name on it and ordering fine buildings for Baghdad. The Iraqis hired out the jobs--to European engineers for hotels and oil refineries and to Egyptian labor for the dirty work. The Iraqis supervised and shared in the lucrative construction contracts.

Saddam Hussein and his family became rich.

The man from the village neglected agriculture, which declined. So the people flocked to the cities to live on food imported and subsidized by Hussein’s growing government.

Power must also be paid for. Defense expenditure is almost 30% of the economy. The army wasn’t worth the money. It would have lost to Iran were it not for help from abroad. That war landed Iraq in debt, prompting Hussein’s ruinous attempt to grab Kuwait for easy money.

Now Hussein speaks of himself as a victim of the foreigners--telling one group last week that he’s a “martyr.” Meanwhile, he is beefing up the secret police to maintain his hold on power.

But his power is being sharply limited. The United Nations is demanding that weapons be destroyed to remove Iraq’s threat to other nations, and it continues economic sanctions to drive Hussein from office.

So far, common Iraqi citizens are suffering and the United Nations must find a way to finance food for the people, making sure that Hussein and his cronies can’t use the money.

But the larger sanctions, particularly on oil exports, must stay until they bind on Hussein and his military elite.

Iraqis may face a hard year ahead. And if Saddam Hussein falls, many here fear a blood bath as there was in Romania when Nicolae Ceausescu fell. But a Kurdish leader dismisses such fears. “It is a blood bath now with the dictatorship,” he says. “The future cannot be worse.”

The hope is that the future could be better. Iraq’s population is diverse, with Arabs and Kurds and Turkomans, and Shia and Sunni Muslims, and many people who want a secular state beyond religious and tribal differences. And that diversity makes this a potentially ideal place for representative government. Establishing a representative government is the dream of many Iraqis--what they fervently call “democracy.”

It would be a better, and more prosperous, world if their dreams came true.