Pardon Me for Asking, but Do You Really Want Democracy in Iraq?

Abstract

Democracy claims the power of governance for the people. Praising democracy is laudable, for it promises a political system superior to autocracy and dictatorship. An established political elite, however, has little incentive to give up its monopoly of power to the people it governs if it is not dependent on them. The fundamental incentive for democratization, this article argues, is a government's need for revenue, without which it cannot survive. A government dependent on citizen's taxes for its expenses will have an incentive to allow democracy to flourish. Conversely, a government flush with continuous revenue streams from exports of nationalized resources or foreign aid has little reason to embrace democracy. The path to democracy is to return a country's nationalized wealth directly to the nation.

Notes

I am indebted to my colleague Dr. William J. Olson for reading the first draft of this article and for his many helpful comments.

Bradley C. S. Watson, Civil Rights and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy (Lanham, 1999), 2.

Mick Moore, “Death Without Taxes: Democracy, State Capacity, and Aid Dependence in the Fourth World,” Mark Robinson and Gordon White, eds., The Democratic Developmental State: Politics and Institutional Design (London, 1998), 86.

Vernon L. Smith, “The Iraqi People's Fund,” The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2003, A14.

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Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (New York, 1990), 9, 38.

Vernon L. Smith, “The Iraq People's Fund,” The Wall Street Journal (Eastern Edition), December 22, 2003, A14.

John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston, 1952), 178.

Albert Keidel, “China's Looming Crisis—Inflation Returns,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief 56, September 2007, 2, 3.

Nation is to apply inclusively to everyone born in the country and legal immigrants irrespective of ethnicity, religious confession, political affiliation, tribal loyalty, and minority status.

Moore, op. cit., 85.

James McDonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York, 2003), 3.

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For instance, Paolo Mauro, “Corruption and Growth,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 110, no. 3, (August 1995): 681–712.

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William R. Polk, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (New York, 2007), a study of 10 insurgencies through history, concludes on that simple point. See David Ignatious, “The Dignity Agenda,” The Washington Post, Sunday, October 14, 2007, B7, c. 5.

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Barry Holden, Understanding Liberal Democracy 2nd ed. (London, 1993), 17, quoted in Bradley C S. Watson, Civil Rights, 3.

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A young Mongolian Communist diplomat, graduate of the prestigious School of Foreign Affairs at the University of Moscow, asked me during a visit in 1976 what prevented a capitalist from taking a customer's money and disappearing. A capitalist, I told him, would not be satisfied with only one opportunity to make some money. He would seek to make the opportunity to make money continuous and the transaction repetitive to make a lot of money. To get the customer to return requires good service.

Stephen Knack, “Aid Dependence and Quality of Governance: Cross-Country Empirical Tests,” Southern Economic Journal, vol. 68, no. 2, 310–329.

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Moore, op. cit., 88–91.

Aaron Tornell and Philip R. Lane, “Are Windfalls a Curse? A Non representative Agent Model of the Current Account,” Journal of International Economics, vol. 44, no. 83 (1998): 83–112. Also see the case of Nigeria in Birsall, Vaishnav, and Ayres, op. cit., 98.

Thomas Friedman, “The First Law of Petropolitics,” Foreign Policy (May/June 2006): 28–36. Also, see Moises Naim, “Russia's Oily Future,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2004), 95; Javier Corrales, “Hugo Boss,” Foreign Policy (January/February 2006): 32–40.

Michael L. Ross, “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?” World Politics, vol. 53 (April 2001): 325–361; Richard M. Auty, Sustaining Development in Mineral Economies: The Resource Curse Thesis (London, 1993), 1–10, 241, 257. Easterly argues that oil-rich societies' leaders try desperately to avoid democracy. See Easterly, op. cit., 125.

Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warmer, “Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth,” Center for International Development and Harvard Institute for International Development, Harvard University, November 1997, Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) Classification: 04, Q0, F43.

Amir Taheri, at a conference on “Iran: The Nuclear Threat and Beyond,” at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, September 7, 2006.

I am grateful to Joshua Yaphe, research assistant at NESA, for his valuable assistance in gathering and compiling the statistics and creating the charts.