Sistani and slavery
Responding to my post on Sistani, Brad de Longsuggests that I need to read the Declaration of Independence , going on to assert that
A Bonapartist or a fascist or a theocratic dictatorship is not a legitimate government, no matter how large are its plebiscitary majorities and how enthusiastic are its crowds. The only governments that have even a possibility of being truly legitimate are those that maintain an underlying liberal order–which means protecting minority (and women’s) rights.
I’m tempted to snap back with Dr Johnson’s observation on the American revolutionaries
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes (quote from memory here)
but Brad’s post and the comments thread raise a number of important issues.
Before coming to the serious issues, let me agree that the kind of once-off plebiscites pioneered by Napoleon III don’t confer legitimacy on a government, any more than the caucuses proposed by Bremer, or the spurious elections held under Saddam. I don’t see how this could be inferred from my post. Obviously there’s a risk that any post-Saddam government could close down democracy, but I don’t think that a Shia majority government is any more likely to do this than any of the obvious alternatives. Such a government could win office in a free and fair election.
The serious issues are twofold. First, what kinds of violations of a liberal democratic ideal are sufficient to justify the forcible overthrow of a government. As many commentators on Brad’s post noted, the example of the United States is relevant. Until the Civil War, the US Constitution enshrined slavery as part of its fundamental law, notably in the provision counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of calculating voting rights. Until around 1900, women were denied the vote. Until the civil rights era, blacks were denied the vote in much of the US. Until the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, many of the kinds of discrimination against women likely to be introduced by an Islamist government were lawful and some were mandated by law.
Which, if any, of these would have justified the forcible overthrow of the United States government by a government with more liberal and democratic policies, assuming this had been militarily feasible. I’m going to take my stand with Dr Johnson and say that, any time between the abolition of slavery in Britain and the election of Abraham Lincoln, Britain would have been justified in reconquering the United States in order to free the slaves, assuming that such an invasion could have been undertaken and sustained. ( In practice, of course, not only was such a course of inaction not feasible, but the British government came close to recognising the Confederacy)
On the other hand, egregious though the subsequent violations of liberal democracy were, none were such as to justify the overthrow of the (imperfect) democratic institutions of the United States. even if this had been feasible. The same applies to the many other examples of democratic governments that have restricted the rights of minorities or even mahorities.
The second question is whether, the occupying powers have some sort of right of conquest which enables them to demand more of the Iraqi people, before restoring their right of self-government, than would be sufficient to give a government international legitimacy in other circumstances. I don’t believe there is. The invasion was illegal, but to the extent that it had any legal justification, it was based on the Saddam government’s noncompliance with a range of UN resolutions. There’s no reason to suppose that a Shia majority government will not comply with those resolutions, and therefore no justification in deferring elections in the hope of preventing the election of such a government.