with sufficient social cohesion to ensure these institutions will be perceived as representing the popular will.
What Iraq needs – before reforms aimed at improving the army or other institutions can make a difference – is the creation of an inclusive dynamic that mitigates the state‘s legitimacy crisis by making the vast majority of people throughout the country feel that the state works equally well for them.
An inclusive dynamic would demand far more than the inclusion of figures from diverse sects in government – a shallow standard that too often appears to satisfy the Obama administration‘s definition of the term. It would require the formation of an inclusive social contract and covenant, and the creation of an overarching national narrative that would help build and reinforce a new sense of national identity.
Social covenants, forged from negotiations among a country‘s major groups, and thus akin to a horizontal society-society compact, define the origins and makeup of political society and help build a common identity.
In Iraq, there was no serious, patient, and inclusive framework for Iraqis to debate and agree on a common national identity, set of values, and sense of purpose for the state.
Instead, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority‘s (CPA) early focus was on the need to quickly draft a constitution. The CPA failed to understand that after decades of dictatorship and conflict, Iraqis needed time to redefine the society-society relationship before trying to establish the rules for the social contract, namely the state-society relationship.
Moreover, only six months were allocated to draft Iraq‘s new constitution. By comparison, it took South Africa seven years to draft its post-transition constitution, Nepal is nearing a full decade of negotiating its new constitution.
Even worse than the pace was the politics of participation in the Iraqi constitution-making process. US officials, Kurdish political parties, some Shia Islamists, and Iraqi expatriates played the leading roles – excluding the country‘s other major groups.
An inclusive process must also seek to generate an overarching national narrative capable of expressing in simple terms how the society understands its collective identity, its past and its future.
Iraq has long suffered from competing national narratives that preclude the emergence of an overarching, shared sense of identity. In reality, the story of Iraq has never been so black and white. In the best-case scenario, creating an inclusive dynamic in Iraq would take years or decades. However, the country does not have better options.
As long as the majority of Iraqis do not feel that they have an equal stake in the state, quick-fix solutions and reforms will not lift the country out of the perpetual state of crisis that it has endured for more than a decade.
This article has been excerpted from: ‘Beating ISIL: without identity, Iraqis have no will’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com