How Best to Build Democracy: Laying a Foundation for the New Iraq

A democratic Iraq will also require a competent, well-trained, well-equipped, and honest police force that is separate and distinct from the military. Colombia's special antinarcotics force, built from scratch with U.S. funding, offers an example of how such units can be constructed even under the most challenging of circumstances. Other developing countries, including South Africa, have had some success in creating effective neighborhood or community police forces. As with ombudsmen, the construction and vetting of such constabularies should start immediately, allowing the new cops to earn their stripes during the period of occupation.

A related issue is how to structure the military. The danger of a budding democracy's falling to military rule looms especially large in a country such as Iraq, with its long history of coups and attempted coups. At the same time, the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, and other countries over the last two decades suggest that states with a legacy of civil-military relations as bad as Iraq's can still establish full civilian control. Although there is no single formula for doing so, the following steps seem prudent in this case. First, Washington should limit the size of the military overall, especially the army. Second, it must integrate Shi'ite and Kurdish elements, including the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Kurdish Pesh Merga, to ensure that the Iraqi officer corps is not dominated by Sunni Arabs. Next, the officer corps must be purged of Baath Party loyalists or those who have been involved in massive violations of human rights. Intelligence functions must be separated from the military and placed under the control of civilian agencies; any companies that the military currently runs must also be privatized. Military promotions must be made a matter of professional standards and seniority, rather than connections to the executive branch, and the legislature must be given final authority over high-level promotions and budgets. Civilian courts should get formal, ultimate control over military officers. The post of the civilian commander in chief should be specified in the constitution, and all cabinet officers, including the minister of defense, should be civilians. The military's official mission should be explicitly confined to external defense, rather than internal security or law enforcement, and military curricula must be altered to reflect this limited role. Finally, Iraq's rebuilders should encourage the training of civilians in military matters so that they can oversee budgets, procurement, and the like.

IN OTHER NEWS

In most emerging democracies, mass media are controlled by politicized state monopolies (as in eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia) or private oligarchs who trade favorable coverage for political influence (as in Latin America). The result in both cases is a systematic bias in favor of incumbents and the wealthy, inadequate scrutiny of official misconduct, a dearth of civic and popular voices, and an absence of public forums where political options can be peacefully debated. These problems can be mitigated by placing state-owned media under the direction of professionalized, politically insulated boards, appointments to which require supermajorities in the legislature. Creating a system for allocating private broadcasting concessions that is likewise insulated from direct executive control would further strengthen press freedom. Because the freest press regimes in the developing world involve a mixture of public and private ownership, and because many local private investors may lack sufficient capital, both domestic and foreign private ownership should be allowed. Finally, a variety of protections for the press -- including laws on freedom of information and the protection of the confidentiality of journalistic sources -- can be enshrined in the constitution and the legal code. These laws hardly need to follow a U.S. format; various countries and international organizations are capable of rendering expert advice.

The challenges to democratization in Iraq are huge. Yet even if Iraq becomes a semiauthoritarian regime -- of the type that currently governs Russia -- certain democratic institutions may endure. Building these institutions now will substantially enhance the odds that Iraqis emerge from Anglo-American occupation better off than they were before.¶