Let’s Define Democracy, First

Even in the midst of what has become a virtual civil war, the bickering factions in Iraq’s newly elected parliament are no closer to producing a government. The interim prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafri, a Shia, is denouncing American concerns at the delay as unwarranted interference. What a charade of coalition building.
For many in the Bush administration, the spectacle in Baghdad is democracy in action. To be sure, the escalation in Shia-Sunni fighting has diverted attention from continuing casualties on American forces.
Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia are too seared in the bipartisan consciousness in Washington for Americans to declare victory and withdraw. Even the worst critics of Bush’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq ardently favor staying the course in order to deter terrorism by building democracy.
What democracy? F. Gregory Gause explains in an update to his intrepid essay "Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?" (Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005) nearly two-thirds of the candidates elected to the new Iraqi parliament last December won on platforms that explicitly called for a greater role for Islam in politics.
Among the 215 Arab parliamentarians elected (the others being Kurds and smaller minority group representatives), 81 percent campaigned on lists that were sectarian and Islamist. Granted, not all of these people believe in obliterating America to save the world. Some do come quite close, though. Here’s the shocker: only nine percent came from the explicitly secular, non-sectarian, and multiethnic Iraqi National List of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Take the other two manifestations of democracy in action elsewhere in the volatile region – Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood won 88 seats, 20 percent of the 444 elected seats, in the November-December balloting tightly controlled by President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.
Gause explains that this figure understates the significance of the Brotherhood's showing. The group had fielded only about 150 candidates as part of a tacit agreement with the government that allowed Brotherhood candidates to campaign openly, and so it won almost 60 percent of the seats it contested. Liberal, leftist, and nationalist opposition parties, on the other hand, won 11 seats, fewer than 3 percent of the total.
In January’s elections to the Palestinian parliament, Hamas -- the political wing of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood – trounced Fatah, the late and hesitant convert to peace founded by Yasir Arafat. Hamas carried 56 percent of the seats against Fatah's 34 percent. Liberal, leftist, and other nationalist parties won seven percent.
Proponents of democracy must reconcile themselves with the emergence of Islamists in certifiably open elections. If this demonstration of the popular will is the kind of success the Bush administration envisions for the wider region – and eventually the rest of the world – then it needs to sort things out. Freeze on aid to a Hamas government is not the kind of encouragement Palestinian voters expect.
The creation of a liberal-secular-nationalist base across the Arab world probably is the best America can hope for. Such formations may require several electoral cycles in most places. Still struggling to form a government three months after the elections, Iraq is the model the region should avoid.