Iraqi Democracy, Full Speed Ahead.
(Oh wait! We forgot about the schools...)

Democracy is a tricky thing. If you live in one, you generally hope that you have some intelligent folks living alongside you, because if you don’t, you’re going to be subject to some laws that you may think are quite stupid. But you can’t really complain about it, because that’s the way it works.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Aristotle called democracy the “perversion of constitutional government” and suggested that it benefits only individuals, never the common good.

We’ve had about 800 years to get used to the idea, if you count the Magna Carta as an “official” step towards the “rule of the people”—but it took some doing, some evolving, some trial and error, a few dozen wars, and a few tyrants. If you are of the opinion that we should give the “Western” world the benefit of the doubt, you can say that we’ve been trying hard to work out the kinks, to address issues like blacks and women voting.

We’ve also had the advantage of some smart people: Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, The Federalist, Tocqueville…. These people were not only smart, but educated.

Alex Hamilton. A fellow who wrote about democracy.

Hobbes. An important political theorist.

Another guy named Hobbes. Less optimistic than the first.

One thing people do generally agree on is that in order for a democracy to work, people have to know what they’re talking about. “My gut tells me what to do,” is not a “democracy-friendly” kind of statement.

Hence the importance of education and having educated people in a functional democracy. People have to know what’s going on and they have to be able to discuss it with the other folks around so that each person’s individual ideas get refined and then inform a common decision. In a real democracy, you may not be happy with the result of the decision, but at least you have the comfort of knowing that your opinion was taken into account. And who knows, maybe you were wrong.

So what happens if you try to set up a democracy somewhere without much education? Let’s take an imaginary plane trip to…Iraq.

A rough recent history:

Pre-1980: Iraq has arguably the best education system in the Middle East, universal primary school enrolment, and very high female literacy rates. It has a top-notch university system and a thriving intellectual community.

1980-1988: Iraq-Iran War; Iraq gets its infrastructure bombed to smithereens. (Note: under the heading “infrastructure,” add the subheading, “schools.”)

1990-1991: Gulf War; Iraq gets bombed to smithereens. Again.

1991-2003: United Nations-imposed sanctions; A blasted Iraq gets cut off from the rest of the world. A quarter of a million women and children die of malnutrition. Children leave school to help their families eat. Literacy rates drop from nearly total literacy to less than 60%.

1991-present: Middle class immigration; There’s no food, no water, no employment, no school. You’re a teacher? A scientist? A journalist? You have a ticket out of hell. You go elsewhere.

2003-present: Iraq War, take II: Iraq gets bombed to smithereens. For the third time. Civil war breaks out and tensions harboured since the beginning of last century come out in atavistic clashes and violent chaos.

So who is left to rule Iraq? Well, half the population is under 18. That knocks out a few candidates (though these folks, who have known nothing but war, malnutrition, an absence of education, and the knowledge that the western world is responsible for the mess that it their collective life, will be ruling Iraq in the next 2-3 decades—have we seen the last of trouble from Iraq? Let’s wait until today’s 10 year-olds get in power.)

The rest of the population has been stripped of its administrators, managers, businessmen, scientists, journalists…etc. No one has had access to quality education since around 1980. Kids going to school face the threat of kidnapping, violence, and bombings. The schools, overcrowded, rarely have water or sanitation.

A school in Iraq.

That means that anyone under about 45 years old isn’t educated. That means that there are no teachers. That means that schools are blown to smithereens. Who's going to be making decisions soon?
Future Iraqi leaders in training.

Good luck on this democracy project, George and Dick, I wish you Godspeed.

(For more fun stats about the state of Iraqi society, check out
"Children in Iraq tell of hardships getting to school".