With the remarkable overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by a group of rebels led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, American officials are scrambling for a strategy. The U.S. is rightly reaching out to al-Sharaa, hoping that, despite his jihadist roots, the relatively tolerant mini-state that he recently led in northern Syria augurs well for a future national government that eschews extremism and violence.
Some are also already clamoring for early elections as proof that al-Sharaa will be inclusive in his future government style, allowing roles not just for his fellow Sunnis from the north, but also Kurds, Christians, Alawites and others in Syria’s complex ethnic and sectarian tapestry.
But early elections could be a mistake. Inclusivity and moderation are indeed immediate priorities for Syria, but a big national vote is not. Democracy does not itself guarantee peace in a country so recently riven by autocratic rule and a long civil war.
Even more to the point, elections — even reasonably free and fair ones — do not guarantee democracy. As our own Founding Fathers understood but we often seem to forget, real democracy requires checks and balances on any branch of government or ruling party, together with a strong legal system providing protection for the rights of the individual.
Take post-Saddam Hussein Iraq as a case in point. After the Iraqi dictator was overthrown by a U.S.-led coalition in 2003, President George W. Bush asked Ambassador Paul Bremer to act as Iraq’s leader for a year, during which time he would oversee creation of a broadly representative Iraqi Governing Council that would provide at least a patina of homegrown rule during the American-led occupation period. Then, the U.S. and partners would turn over power to a temporary Iraqi government in mid-2004. Three rounds of elections would follow in 2005: The first to select an interim Iraqi government, the second to approve a constitution and the third to choose a parliamentary-style government with a four-year term.
It all sounded great. Bush was understandably proud and hopeful when he pointed to an Iraqi guest at his State of the Union address in early 2005 whose purple finger evinced recent participation in the first of those Iraqi votes.
But it did not work out so well. To be sure, Iraq had many problems besides rushed elections. By early 2005, the country was beset by insurgency, terrorism and civil war. But all the voting made things worse. The problem was that, in the hasty move to elections, Iraqis were left with the dilemma of how to organize themselves and protect their rights in time to make sure that they did not lose out. The prospect of near-term elections produced not just hopefulness but fear of exclusion.
That fear was greatest among Sunnis — Hussein’s sectarian group, but a minority in the country — who already saw the writing on the wall. They knew that Shiite-dominated groups would likely win future elections, and that some Shiite leaders would likely seek vengeance for years of oppression under Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baathist Party. Many Sunnis already felt aggrieved by Bremer’s earlier decision to exclude most higher-ranking former Baathists from government.
Dozens, even hundreds, of political parties emerged in Iraq as the 2005 votes approached. The result was a cacophony of contending voices. Worse than the chaos, though — after all, democracy is usually messy, even in places where it’s well established — was the dynamic of worsening sectarian polarization. The main political parties that dominated the elections — the PUK and KDP in Kurdistan, the United Iraqi Coalition among several Shiite groups, the Tawafoq Iraqi Front and Hewar National Iraqi Front among Sunnis — all had strong and clear sectarian origins and purposes.
Iraqi citizens who were fearful of being left out in their country’s future gravitated to these parties, some strongly associated with armed militias, and cast their votes accordingly. Most Sunnis simply boycotted the first round of elections in 2005, but then thought better of disenfranchising themselves in the final vote of the year. Turnout in the December 2005 parliamentary elections was high — but rather than reflect underlying enthusiasm about a democratic political process, it probably reflected fear and foreboding.
Thus, in 2006, Iraq gained its first fully democratic government in history — and the war continued to get worse. Even the June 2006 killing by American forces of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi failed to reduce the violence. President Bush directed his staff to start working on a new security plan for Iraq that became the highly successful “surge” of 2007, but things would not improve until then. Only with a radically different and better resourced military strategy under Gen. David Petraeus — combined with the equally important efforts by Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to convince Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki to govern in a more inclusive way (something that Maliki only did temporarily, alas) — could the tide be turned.
Until then, democracy did more to empower extremist groups and leaders in Iraq than to empower the people. Security forces, as well as Iraq’s new court system, were simply too weak to check the cycles of fear, distrust and opportunism. Democracy in Iraqi equaled the tyranny of the majority more than protection of the rights of all, exacerbating paranoia more than providing a channel for nonviolent political competition.
None of this is to argue that the new Syria should be an autocracy run by a single individual or party. But the pace of democratization is crucial. Political parties need time to form around ideas and visions for the country, not simply sectarian identity. The security situation needs to be stabilized before voting can, for most people, be about more than ensuring their own survival and that of their families and communities.
Taking decades to establish democracy, as with Taiwan and South Korea in the 20th century, is probably too long. But post-World War II Germany and Japan needed a few years; Indonesia needed a couple of decades of gradual transition to democratic rule. Iraq might have made it after a decade, despite America’s mistakes, if we hadn’t left abruptly in 2011. Building roadmaps to full democratic rule that take years rather than months is the wiser choice here — and the more realistic set of expectations to try to induce new leadership in Syria to embrace.
There is no easy way to stabilize a country coming out of dysfunction, dictatorship and civil war. The U.S. under President-elect Donald Trump will have to continue to look for ways, working with regional partners, to incentivize Syria’s new leaders to create inclusive governance that protects individual and minority rights. But those goals are much more important than a quick move to a showy election that would likely, at best, provide more symbol than substance for building the new Syria — and that at worst could actually help rip the nation apart, just as it stands a chance of coming together.
Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”
