By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, NY TIMES

KUWAIT

Listen to the American hawks after a few glasses of wine, and you might be seduced into thinking that after overthrowing Saddam Hussein we're going to turn Iraq into a flourishing democracy.

But I'm afraid it's a pipe dream, a marketing ploy to sell a war.

We haven't even been able to nurture full democracy in modern, bustling Kuwait, where women still cannot vote, or in Saudi Arabia, which is more egalitarian — neither men nor women can vote. I had a nice insight into the limits of democracy in Kuwait the other night when I was at the palatial home (come to think of it, the reason it was palatial was that it was a palace) of a top Kuwaiti.

A cellphone rang, and my hosts beamed and informed me of the arrest of Muhammad al-Mulaifi, a young government official who had been quoted in The New York Times a few days earlier as gushing sympathetically about two terrorists who had shot an American marine to death and wounded another. I asked the sheik (I'm trying to protect my source, and fortunately there are enough sheiks and palaces in Kuwait that I still am) what the charges were against Mr. Mulaifi.

Speaking too openly to an American journalist? Insulting the Great Father Across the Sea? The arrest underscored the risks of expressing a dissident view publicly at a time when Kuwait was shocked and embarrassed by the killing of the marine. The episode is a reminder that while Kuwait is one of the freest countries in the gulf region, with a lively press that dares scold even members of the ruling Sabah clan, it is also a family-run venture that falls well short of being a full-fledged democracy.

In the immediate aftermath of the gulf war, the first Bush administration leaned on the Sabahs, and the result was a restoration of a Parliament that the emir had dissolved in 1986. The Parliament has since grown more important, with members periodically doing their best to embarrass cabinet members in the finest tradition of democratic rule. But the U.S. soon lost interest in prodding the Sabah family, and so 11 years after the gulf war progress has been modest, even in peaceful sandbox-sized Kuwait.

Then there's Iraq. A central challenge is that democracy would effectively take power from the 16 percent Sunni Muslim minority that has always run Iraq and hand it to the 60 percent Shiite population, and this transfer could be very bloody.

"You can't expect to have a real democracy in Iraq, such as we're dreaming of," notes Abdullah Sahar, a political scientist at Kuwait University. Building a democracy in Kuwait is "very easy," he says, compared with doing the same in Iraq. (Perhaps it's a bit odd for the not entirely democratic Kuwaitis to scoff at prospects for democracy in their neighbor, but most do so.)

Even if we could find an Iraqi version of Hamid Karzai (no, no, Ahmed Chalabi, don't leave London yet), and even if Iraq were ready for democracy, there would be another huge obstacle — the neighbors.

"There will not be a democracy in Iraq, not a real democracy," said Mohammed Al-Jassem, editor of the newspaper Al-Watan in Kuwait. "That would mean allowing a Shiite state. America and the gulf countries cannot afford that." The rise of a Shiite state in Iraq could strengthen Iran and lead to clashes with Shiite minorities in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other countries, he warned.

Actually, it seems to me that the risks of democracy are smaller than the risks of military rule. But that may be academic, because odds are that the neighboring governments would do their best to block popular rule from ever emerging in Iraq.

Kuwaiti rulers seem to think, based on assurances from U.S. officials, that Shiite domination is potentially so destabilizing that democracy is not even an option for Iraq. As Kuwait sees it, the possibilities range from a Tommy Franks viceroyalty to the installation of a Sunni Hashemite king, some relative of Jordan's King Abdullah II. Jordan already seems to be quietly lobbying for this outcome.

"Democracy is just not in the cards there," one Kuwaiti official said.

Of course, even a nicer tyrant — Saddam Lite — would be a huge improvement for the Iraqis. But I'm afraid that the prattle about creating a democratic model on the Tigris is just a shrewd White House marketing attempt to bait and switch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/18/opinion/
18KRIS.html?ex=1035952541&ei=1&en=736790ed8b427a79