1-8-08 Democracy Rising

Democracy is on the rise. In Iraq it is welling up in an "awakening" in spite of the violence and the occupation. At the same time, our own American democracy is seeing an improbable candidate talk of unity and common ground in spite of the cynicism, polarization and gridlock we have been enduring. In both places, the tide of democracy is coming, as it always does, from the people.

First Iraq, where the people and not the military are dampening the violence. To some, the surge inserting 30,000 additional American combat troops is working because it is pacifying the country. To others, the surge is not working because the Maliki government can't get its act together and govern the country.

Both are wrong. Our military is not imposing control. Causation runs the other way. The Iraqis are doing it on their own. They are controlling the violence because they know the American military cannot sustain the surge and will soon start leaving. Simply put, the Iraqis do not want Al Qaeda in Iraq controlling their country and they are doing something about it.

Despite the US troops out in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, democracy does not come from the barrel of a gun. The principal reason that the attacks on Americans and against civilian targets are down is because Moqtada al-Sadr told his Shi’a militia to stand down and the Sunni sheiks told their people to cooperate with the American military. They both did this because something deeper is happening.

A bottom-up military-political revolution is occurring despite the occupation and the US imposed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It may not be democracy as we think of it, voting and all that, but it is the people acting in their own behalf without any central control.

For the first time there is hope in Iraq. The Iraqi people are forming Awakening Councils across Iraq. Based on tribal, territorial and personal ties, these new groups work with the American military and overlap with new groups called Concerned Local Citizens (CLC's, in US military parlance).

Many of the members of these groups were, until recently, insurgents. Now, in addition to their tribal and reconstruction responsibilities, their para-military personnel (at $300 per person per month from us) patrol with and assist the US military.

Something is also happening in America. The people are telling politicians they don't want social values demeaned as wedge issues nor do they want triangulation around dirty partisanship.

At the moment, Barack Obama he is being pushed as much as he is leading this change. When he and the people in this movement say change, they mean, at heart, they want the same self-determination that is moving the Iraqi democracy.

Barack Obama can be the candidate of change because he is such an improbable candidate. The excitement and direction arise not just from the eloquence of the candidate himself but also from the crowds that he draws everywhere. They are the ones who, in the entrance and exit polls, say they want change. Obama certainly personifies that otherness or change. Huckabee is also such an improbable candidate and may be as open to real change.

Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, following their loss in the Iowa caucuses, immediately fixated on that word change. They called themselves agents of change and, touting their experience and accomplishments, made lists of the changes that they have made, respectively, in government and the private sector.

They haven't a clue. They don't understand how fundamental this is.

Changing our democracy is not the wonkish policy tweaking of a Clinton or a Romney. Real change responds to those two-thirds of the people who tell the pollsters that our country is going in the wrong direction.

Americans don't want to be told to be afraid, to cower behind border fences nor to watch the government twist our Constitution out of shape. A lot of people are telling us they are ready for a risky new direction, where things are not tried and tested, not shrouded in secrecy and where policy decisions are not for sale.

Change, to Obama and his bandwagon, means a framing of new questions, a changing of the topic and an openness to everyone and everything. It is the demand that we turn to the people for new questions and new answers.

Democracy in Iraq has something going for it: there are fewer entrenched interests that have to be rooted out. After all we did get rid of Saddam Hussein for them. On the other hand we Americans, as John Edwards points out with such the passion, have a deeply entrenched system of moneyed privilege and corporate power that it will be difficult to change.

Maybe it took the botched presidency of George Bush to make the people of America and the Muslims of the Middle East aware of the responsibility all people have to govern themselves.

Around the world democracy is on the march and no one knows where it will stop.