ABSTRACT
Many people talk of the lack of democratic tradition as one of the reasons for the failure or lack of progress in the democratization process in Iraq. Others talk of the need to blend democracy with local values in order to make the new system familiar and more acceptable to people. While some others say democracy is a new system and it has to be taken in its entirety since it’s indivisible. There is a valid argument for both views. Samuel Huntington predicted ‘democracy could become a dominant feature of the Middle East and North Africa in 1990s’.1 His prophecy didn’t materialize, although Iraqis did rise against the dictatorship in 1991 demanding democracy and reforms, but they were brutally suppressed. Also, the Arab Spring broke out in the second decade of the twenty-first century, although it has not produced a stable democracy yet despite the fact that it has managed to change regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. But even then, Huntington identified the obstacle for democracy in Islamic countries as ‘cultural’.2 But he rejected the notion that certain cultures are permanent obstacles to development in one direction or another. He regards cultural obstacles as limited.3 Iraqi sociologist, Ali Al-Wardi, saw democracy and democratic values as ‘social rather than political virtues’.4 Al-Wardi emphasized the ‘disjointed’ nature of Iraqi society, but he was not ‘fatalist’ regarding the possibilities of change. Rather, he insisted that ‘no social or political project could succeed if it didn’t take a realistic account of the country’s history’.5 Al-Wardi did come out in favour of a form of democracy based on both recognition of the country’s diversity and proportional representation. He maintained that
Iraqi people are divided against themselves and their sectarian, ethnic, and tribal struggles exceed those of any other Arab people and there is no way of resolving this condition better than adopting a democratic system, where each group can participate in power according to its proportional number.6
