January 20, 2004 -- It may have been deToqueville who said something like, “The greatest danger facing this new American form of government will be when the people discover they can vote themselves money.”  I do not recall where I read that, but it struck a chord.  The difference between Caesar and a democracy is that Caesar is a government made of one tyrant and a democracy is a government made of a crowd of tyrants.

Not that anybody educated in a American public school in recent decades knows it, but the founding fathers gave us a republic, not a democracy.  That came back to me as I watched the Shiites demonstrating for direct elections in downtown Iraq yesterday.  Those folks comprise the largest single population group in that nation, and if given the chance to select via direct majority vote those who will write their constitution will, in a single day, turn that country into a Shiite theocracy.  That will almost guarantee decades of trouble in the desert.  Moslems are not particularly tolerant of sects.  In America, a Presbyterian has no problem with a Lutheran president, but over there it’s a different kettle of camels.

If they get their wish, and do what I expect they will do, when the violence breaks out the country will have to be partitioned.  Kurds up here, Shiites over that way and Sunnis down there.  Christians or Jews, Buddhists or Confucianists need not apply for power. 

It all brings out the brilliance of the system of our founding fathers.  Direct vote of federal representatives (not senators, at first) and indirect votes for the national executives.  The electoral college may have in part been installed just because Jefferson, Adams and the bunch were so very chary of pure democracy.  The protection of minority groups -- in that case, states -- was there at the first.  Knowing that the big population states would get most of the representatives in the House, the Senate was created as a non-democratic form.  Rhode Island, which has a tiny fraction of House members compared to California, has as many senators as California.  Since legislation has to pass both houses to get to the president, that little move made it difficult for a few large population states to bully a bunch of small population states.

If the Shiites in Iraq will not accept this premise, and instead go for a pure democracy, were I a Sunni or a Kurd, I’d either leave town or get an AK47, because without question trouble will be right around the corner.  

If Bush is serious about the United Nations stepping in on this one, knowing his general opinion of that body of petty pirates, it may be an escape route for the administration.  He knows that while it may just be possible to separate the Shiites and the Kurds with a new border, to give the Kurds their own territory will create a border with Turkey that is similar to the DMZ between North and South Korea, only hotter.  The Turks, to say it gently, would not be amused.  There are historic reasons for that, and their hands are not entirely clean in the matter.

Frankly, I don’t see how Bush can both get out of there and leave good government in his wake.  If I were him, and you can thank your lucky stars I’m not, I would arm the Sunnis and the Kurds, have them line the northern and southern limits of the Shiite home areas and issue a flat demand to the Shiites.  I would say, “You will agree to a government that has protections similar to ours for population sub-groups, or I will simply pull out our troops and watch you people deal with the oncoming jaws of a vise.”

After years of study of the descendants of Ismael, I am convinced that some of them will show respect for those not of their own sect only if they have a sword at their throat.  While not as true for Sunnis, who are in global terms the Moslem majority, this is abundantly true for the sect which has the majority in Iraq -- the Shiites.  

To put it all another way, now that Saddam is gone,  I see a great potential in Iraq not for representative, constitution-based government, but for sectarian civil war.

(LL)

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