This caricature depicts the way people in many Arab states, from Algeria to Yemen and passing by Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Syria and Iraq, have learnt about their new constitutions over the past six decades of military rule. So it was a novelty to witness Iraqis struggling in public to write a democratic constitution based on wideranging consultation and compromise.

This was the first time that Iraq, created as a state 84 years ago, was allowing its people to write a constitution. The first one, establishing monarchy in 1921, was written by the British. The second, in 1958, was the work of colonels who copied the Soviet model. Subsequent constitutions were written by the so-called Revolutionary Command Council of the Baath party with no popular input.

This time it was different. Talks on writing the new constitution started soon after liberation in 2003 with a series of town-hall-style meetings in which citizens could walk in and say their piece. For a nation terrorised into silence for half a century this was a moment of catharsis. The process was then formalised with the creation of a multiparty commission to come up with proposed drafts.

For months the shaping of a new constitution has been the theme of popular political debates throughout Iraq. More than 300 conferences were held on the subject throughout the country, allowing an estimated 50,000 people to express the views of countless cultural associations, trade unions, guilds, tribal groups and religious fraternities. Iraq’s newly created free media, including more than 150 newspapers and six television stations, almost all privately owned, have brought the debate to every home in the country.

The importance of what is happening in Iraq goes beyond its borders. If, as it now seems likely, Iraq does become a pluralist state committed to building a democracy, it would be hard for the despotic regimes in the region to defend a status quo that has kept much of the Middle East out of the post-Cold War trend towards reform and liberalisation.

The Iraqi constitutional debate has, thanks to the modern media, over-spilt into the whole of the Middle East and familiarised millions of people with terms and concepts regarded as taboo until the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. People are now talking about human rights, democracy, multiparty politics, federalism, gender equality, the place of faith in society, consensus, governmental accountability and, of course, parliaments and elections. New words have been invented to express concepts excluded from the Arab political lexicon by the despots.

From an historic perspective, the liberation of Iraq in April 2003 represented the third East-West shock administered in the heart of the Middle East. The first came in 1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt and brought the concept of statehood. This found resonance in Islam and helped to foster a reform movement symbolised by Jamaluddin Afghani, who told Muslims that they should create “strong states” to resist the advance of Christendom. Over the next two centuries Muslims did create powerful states but these turned into enemies of their peoples and, on occasions, acted as agents of the foreign powers they were supposed to resist.

The second shock came when virtually the whole of the Arab world was conquered by European colonial powers — an event symbolised in 1918 by the entry into Baghdad of a British army. This time, nationalism was the big idea. Egypt and the Levant witnessed the birth of the pan-Arab movement symbolised by such figures as Sati al-Husri and Zaki Arsuzi. The banner of nationalism was raised by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, and by Reza Shah in Iran. But this time, too, the result was the emergence of military regimes nurtured on secular myths.

The liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003, however, administered a shock of a different type.This time the Western powers did not come to preach the cult of the state or the myth of nationhood. Instead they held a democratic discourse which, regardless of whether or not it was sincere — and in politics sincerity is seldom the point — has altered the terms of the debate. This time the big idea is democracy.

The terrorist campaign has obscured the immense successes that the Iraqis have achieved. The most important of these is the destruction of the physical edifice of despotism and the slow but steady crumbling of its intellectual and moral infrastructure.

Iraq is the ideal choice as a model of democratisation in the Arab world. It faces virtually all the problems that Arab states face, including the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the status of women and the role of the clergy. Success in Iraq could inflict a strategic defeat on all despotic ideo- logies in the region.

Soon after the liberation of Iraq in 2003, Yussuf al-Ayyeri, a chief theoretician of al-Qaeda, published a book entitled The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula after the Fall of Baghdad. In it, he designated Iraq as “the greatest battlefield of Islam against the infidel and its native allies”. Al-Ayyeri wrote: “It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, its very survival, is American democracy. To allow Iraq to build would represent Islam’s biggest defeat since the loss of Andalusia.”

This is why all reactionary forces, from pan-Arabists to Islamists, and their sympathisers in the West, have united to prevent Iraq from succeeding. Iraq has become the litmus test of the success of the democratic experience in the region. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. But it is vital for everyone concerned that it does.

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