Occupational Hazards

In two years, Iraq has gone from being a rogue state to being an ailing, if not failing, one. In January 2003, Saddam Hussein's totalitarian dictatorship ruled over most of the country with an iron fist, a mammoth intelligence system, and a bloated 400,000-strong army. Power and resources were concentrated in the hands of Saddam and his lackeys in Baghdad, supported by the Sunni heartland in the center of the country. With its paranoid nationalist ideology, Iraq was a constant threat to its neighbors.

Since then, at least three fundamental changes have occurred. The first has been the collapse of both the government and its support base. Thanks to the insurgency and the elimination of the Baath Party and Saddam's military, Iraq's center of gravity has shifted away from Baghdad and toward the provinces. Second, Iraq is now experiencing real politics -- a revolutionary development for the region. The newly elected assembly and the cabinet of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari are mediating conflicts between political parties and their constituencies through bargaining and tradeoffs rather than intimidation and violence. Third, the country's politics are no longer driven by nationalism and the interests of a middle class of state functionaries, but rather are guided by cultural identities based on ethnic and sectarian blocs. The election of January 30, 2005, confirmed the displacement of the former Sunni ruling class and the emergence of both a dominant Shiite majority and a strong Kurdish minority, with profound consequences for the country's domestic and foreign policies.

These disruptions are unlikely to be settled easily anytime soon. Given the excruciating compromises Iraq's transition to democracy requires, the political process in Baghdad is proceeding about as well as could be expected. But the insurgency, focused mainly on the capital and its environs, is sapping energy, isolating the country's center from the provinces and Iraq from the outside world, and complicating economic revival. Not surprisingly, the hope and optimism that once buoyed believers in the U.S. occupation have given way to disappointment and finger-pointing. Fervent supporters of change, who went into Iraq with the idea of remaking the country, have come up against some hard realities. The whole project now looks costly and uncertain.

Larry Diamond and David Phillips, two disillusioned participants in the reconstruction effort, have written books analyzing what went wrong. As the books' titles indicate, both assign much -- perhaps too much -- of the blame to U.S. policy. Although postmortems on Iraq are numerous by now, these accounts deserve a reading because of their immediacy and depth -- the products of the authors' direct involvement in the process and their personal struggle with the issues.

THE MANGLING WARDENS OF BABYLON

Diamond, a leading U.S. expert on democracy and its exportation, has written a firsthand account of his brief experience with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, the U.S.-run body that ruled Iraq from May 2003 through June 2004, as it attempted to bring democracy to the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Although Diamond opposed the war, he believed in achieving the peace and signed on to serve as an adviser to the CPA, spending three months in Baghdad in 2004. He entered the project with considerable skepticism, uncertain whether Iraq was fit for democracy given its deeply divided society, lack of a strong middle class, and hostile postinvasion environment.

Diamond's book is largely a memoir of his short time in Baghdad. His descriptions of working life in the "palace" -- the heart of the U.S. administration -- are more than interesting anecdotes, because his experience captures much of what was wrong with the U.S. occupation. He was seated at a desk with no instructions other than to help draft Iraq's interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). Diamond and his colleagues, including two Iraqi exiles educated in the West, were asked to settle issues fundamental to Iraq's future, including determining the authority of the occupying power; balancing Shiite ambition, Kurdish separatism, and Sunni alienation; creating a system of checks and balances; and enshrining respect for human rights in the law. Yet they had little contact with the population whose future they were designing. When Diamond did make forays outside the Green Zone to attend seminars and give lectures, he found that Iraqis were increasingly critical of the lack of consultation on the TAL and that the process was quickly losing legitimacy.

When and how to conduct elections for a new Iraqi government was a predictably thorny issue. Shiites wanted elections quickly because, as the country's majority population, they stood to gain the most power from them. Others, particularly Sunnis and middle-class liberals and secularists, feared being marginalized and wanted more time to level the playing field. The Kurds wanted independence, but their leadership was willing to settle for a high degree of self-rule.