Jay Ulfelder explains:
It’s tempting to look at the distortion of Iraq’s first democratic experiment and conclude that the country’s sectarian divisions doom it to dictatorship and violence. In fact, the path Iraq has followed under al-Maliki’s leadership is utterly conventional. As I’ve noted before on this blog, most attempts at democracy are ended by a reassertion of authoritarian rule; in the past half-century, very few countries have managed to make democracy stick on their first try. Since the end of the Cold War, the most common path back to autocracy has been the creeping executive coup, whereby the incumbent party uses the levers of state authority to ensure its continuation in office. The winners of the elections that mark the start of a democratic episode usually don’t try to consolidate their advantage right away, however. Instead, these authoritarian tendencies usually creep in as new elections approach and threaten the incumbents with a loss of power. Comparatively speaking, then, Iraq’s first democratic experiment may have been a bit shorter than most, but the path it followed and end it met were utterly predictable from the start, and that predictability has nothing to do with Iraq’s long history of sectarian rivalry.
Irena L. Sargsyan examines the power of Shi'a sectarianism in the post-American Iraq. What we are seeing is further proof of the utopian insanity of a war I backed.
The Dish 