WHAT DID HE ACHIEVE?:

Keep Allawi at the Helm (Lee Harris, 02/09/2005, Tech Central Station)

Everyone who thinks that democracy in Iraq is a good thing, hold up your hand. Now everyone who thinks that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi should have been soundly defeated in the Iraqi national elections, hold up your hand. Okay -- now how many people who held up their hands to the first question held up their hands for the second question? Few, if any, I would wager. After all, the Americans who were cheering for democracy to work in Iraqi were also cheering for Allawi to win by a landslide. Indeed, for many of us, our hopes for democracy in Iraq depended, to a large degree, on our faith in this one individual leader -- and with good reason. He deserved our faith.

It is true that democracies have historically cast aside great leaders once their task had been discharged, the way England pushed Churchill out of office once the Second World War had been won, for example. But in the case of Allawi, his task had only just begun -- so that excuse doesn't work in this case. Indeed, here we clearly have the case of changing horses in the middle of the stream -- to use the metaphor Franklin Roosevelt came up with, in order to justify his running for a third unprecedented term on the eve of World War II. Only Iraq is not in the middle of a stream; it is in the middle of a struggle for its survival as a nation. It is in desperate need of continuity, strength, and unity.

Regrettably, the next man to be chosen to lead Iraq will depend for his power on an inherent fragile and unstable coalition of Kurds and traditional Shi'ites, and this means that not only will he be weak, but he will be more interested in keeping the support of his political backers than in winning the struggle against the terrorist insurgents. In other words, at the precise moment that Iraq desperately needs a strong and unchallenged leader, it is being turned over to rule by parliamentary debate -- a wonderful form of government if you happen to have the good fortune to live in a society in which men do not routinely blow themselves up in front of schools, hospitals, and police stations, but woefully unfit to deal with a crisis of the magnitude facing Iraq.

It is emotionally uplifting to watch millions of Iraqis line up courageously to take charge of their own lives; but it is profoundly disturbing to discover that, by doing so, they have discarded the one man who, with immense personal courage, has managed the nearly impossible task of preserving the honor and integrity of his nation during a period of military occupation, on the one hand, and all out terrorist assault, on the other. Indeed, Allawi's accomplishment places him in the company of truly inspiring leaders -- precisely the kind of leader that the Muslim world so desperately needs, if there is to be hope for the future of the region.

Nice to have Mr. Harris back even if this essay doesn't make much sense. Mr. Allawi inevitably lost to the slate favored by Ayatollah Sistani, who likewise favors a secular government, though one informed by Shi'ism--just as America has a secular government informed by Judeo-Christianity. Meanwhile, the one thing that Mr. Allawi promised was to be tough on the insurgency and bring some sense of growing security to the country, a promise he obviously failed to deliver on.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2005 1:47 PM