Troubled Argument.

In an oped today in the Wash Post, "Kurdistan's Troubled Democracy" Scott Carpenter and Michael Rubin make a shockingly troubling and inaccurate argument about elections.

(Not all that shocking, though, when one notices that they are from Washington Institute for Near East Policy and AEI.)

I could barely get past this line:

In Iraq, elections are critical. They improve security by legitimizing power relationships while allowing people to vent frustration. In the Jan. 31 provincial elections, Iraqis chose for the most part to "throw the bums out," selecting candidates who they thought would abandon narrow sectarian objectives and best address their problems at the local level. The question now is whether a similar degree of freedom will exist in Iraqi Kurdistan.

My response: In the past elections in Iraq, like 2004, legitimized and cemented detrimental, not to mention formerly nonexistent, sectarian identities, not 'power relationships,' whatever that means. Yes, in the January provincial elections of this year, there were steps away from this as many Iraqis chose candidates proven to deliver services or who supported a national identity over sectarian.

I do not know the intricacies of dealing between the two Kurdish political parties, the KDP and PUK, but I haven't heard great things. I hope to learn more about this when I am over in northern Iraq next year.

But in general, what we should NOT do now is push, or rush, elections like we did in 2004, in areas where there are volatile unstable relations between parties - in this case the PUK and KDP - like they were in 2004 between Sunni and Shii in 2004.

I don't know, again, I am not en expert on the KDP and PUK wranglings up there, but we shouldn't jump to elections as the solutions for political instability.

Paul Collier would love to argue with these guys. His argument is also mine here in response to Rubin and Carpenter. Please see my post on it here Paul Collier's argument - which he put forth in his recent book Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places - is that elections do not mean democracy and even are detrimental to democracy building if conducted at the wrong time, like when other democratic institutions do not exist. And, by the way, he came to this conclusions through an empirical study - he is an economist and he collected a ton of date for this. I've said this before, but I'll say it again, I believe democracy is worth pursuing in the region, just not a la Bush.