Like Ramesh (and with due trepidation) I am going to take issue with Charles Krauthammer today, but on a different issue: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. My rationale follows from this post from yesterday. In his NRO piece today, Dr. K says:

[Sen. Carl] Levin is right that we require a truly national government in Baghdad to obtain our ultimate objective of what [Michael] O’Hanlon and [Kenneth] Pollack call “sustainable stability.” The administration had vainly hoped that the surge would provide a window for the Maliki government to reform and become that kind of government. It will not. We should have given up on Maliki long ago and begun to work with other parties in the Iraqi Parliament to bring down the government, yielding either a new coalition of less sectarian parties or, as Pollack has suggested, new elections.

I have been a Maliki naysayer from the start. But I disagree with the conclusion that “we require a truly national government in Baghdad” to achieve sustainable stability. Iraq has to establish that it is a nation — a body politic committed to a common destiny — before we know what kind of national government it needs. It is, moreover, much easier for Iran and Shiite Islamic fundamentalism to assert their grip at the omnibus national level than town-by-town from the ground up. A ministerial central authority (under our close supervision) that does a few necessary things while we promote autonomy and security at the local level (developing the rule of law and stable institutions) would have a much better chance of fostering the Iraq (or whatever it’s going to be) that we would like to see. It’s a long process, and obsession over the central government, aside from being counter-productive, is born of the illusion that democracy is a quick transition rather than a long-term cultural transformation.

But what I really don’t get is how Dr. K says we should dump Maliki and work with the other parties who could purportedly form a less sectarian coalition. Which other parties would that be? The parties with clout in Iraq are the Shiite fundamentalists. Exactly where is this non-sectarian coalition going to come from? How is it going to be better than Maliki?

The proponents of the democracy project scoffed when people like me complained that we shouldn’t be relying so heavily on Ayatollah Sistani — an Islamic fundamentalist who is no democrat. Dr. Krauthammer thought the new Iraqi constitution, which enshrines Sharia as central to Iraqi law and life, was “sensible“, and took to task “knee-jerk critics” like me who saw it as fundamentally anti-democratic and counter-productive.

So now, having embraced fundamentalist Islam at every turn and denied that there was necessarily anything incompatible between it and a flourishing Iraqi democracy, the complaint is that Iraq’s central government is too sectarian? With due respect, what did we expect was going to happen? We gave them every indication that sectarian was just fine by us, and we did nothing to instill the concept that a national government needs to be secular if it’s going to promote freedom and represent the whole country.

A true democracy doesn’t install a state religion. We’ve permitted (indeed, promoted) a constitution that so installed Islam. We’ve operated under the fiction that the two major Shiite parties (Maliki’s Dawa and Hakim’s Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq – now renamed), both of which would establish a Sharia state, are democratically inclined “moderates.” And we’ve stood by and done nothing as the national government tied Iraq closer to the Islamic Republic of Iran economically, militarily and diplomatically. But now it’s suddenly too sectarian?

Iran is our enemy in the war. And if Islam, which does not separate mosque and state, is a building block of government, that will be an insurmountable obstruction to the development of the secular coalitions we now need but can’t find. I suppose we can continue to ignore these facts, but they are not going away just because we don’t want to deal with them.