As you may have heard, Baghdad’s mayor was deposed today by a SCIRI-backed militia and replaced by a SCIRI loyalist. SCIRI, of course, is one of the main parties currently running Iraq’s federal government. So what’s the USA to do? Here we get to one of the central paradoxes of our current policy. If the municipal coup is allowed to stand, then Iraq isn’t looking very democratic. But if we force Ibrahim Jafari to roll back the coup, well, that wouldn’t be very democratic either. Which is to say that a democracy, by its nature, must be self-governing, and a country where the ultimate coercive authority is held by a foreign military can’t really be self-governing.
