The Iraqi Leadership and Nationalism

How to normalize Iraq?, so asks Ad Melkert, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General to Iraq and head of the U.N. mission in Baghdad, in this op-ed piece. He suggests that to get it right this time, regional and international stakeholders must start letting Iraqis make their own decisions and to stop perceiving Iraq “as if it would still need some form of “supervision.”

I am not worried about the Iraqis, who, having been subjected to tyrannical rule, must have formed an appreciation for political and economic liberties in the past few years. It is the Iraqi leadership that seems to be hindering the country’s march towards genuine democracy.

Newspaper accounts about the Iraqi leadership portray them as sectarian, pro-Iranian, or simply power-grabbers. The current prime minister, Nour al-Maliki,who is seeking reelection and Ahmed Chalabi who heads a commission to weed out candidates connected to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, are Shiites and are viewed by their Sunni counterparts as advancing a Shiite agenda in the region, with the support of Iran which, in turn, is suspected of deploying its own agents to effect the results of the elections.

Iraqi leaders deny these charges. They say that they are simply nationalistic, protecting the sovereignty of their country from internal and external threats. But how do they view nationalism that has so shaped their worldview and affect the policies they adopt for the country? Nationalism can be a dangerous sentiment when it slides into irrational sentiments that lead to myopia and close-mindedness. Patriotism, which is a better version of nationalism, means positioning one’s country from a position of strength, taking what it can to promote its national interests while giving what it can towards building a more stable, secure, and peaceful world. This hinges on statesmen of reasonable expectations and wise judgments.

With the March elections around the corner, and 6,000 candidates vying for political offices, the stakes are high. This is an opportune time for Iraqis to exercise their right to choose leaders across ethnic lines that will be promoting their interests while serving the common good. In an old piece I wrote four years ago about how to form a national unity government in Iraq, I argued that it should be one grounded not on a coalition of all parties representing ethnic loyalties but on the consent of all Iraqis, every single one of them.