The United States has a unique opportunity to be present at the birth of a new state in Iraq. The collapse of the Baathist autocracy is total, with the regime completely discredited. An army fighting for a legitimate regime would not simply walk away from the battlefield. Even granting the devastating effects of American firepower, the Iraqis were certainly capable of mounting more resistance than they in fact offered. This premise, however, does not mean that the Iraqis love us. In fact, it is probably the case that the precipitous collapse of the regime adds to the humiliating sting of an American occupation. Thus, it is critical that the reconstruction of Iraq be completed as rapidly as possible, and that the full withdrawal of foreign forces be conducted with all due and deliberate speed. 

The United States must use this interval to assist in the optimization of the design of Iraqi political institutions. Respecting the right of the Iraqi people to decide their future, we present here suggestions for how to use current political science research to maximize the likelihood that the new regime in Baghdad promotes a friendly, peaceable and relatively free and prosperous state. 

Divisions within Iraqi society pose serious challenges to any future regime. There is a tradeoff between respecting minority rights and having a functional, unitary government. Immediately, we must ask the question of whether, given the vicious acts of the previous government, Iraq can indeed remain united. While granting that this is not a certainty, we argue that there isn’t really any other course but to stay united, given the political interests of the most powerful states in the region. 

Turkey will clearly not allow the creation of a Kurdish state, and it is similarly not in the interests of the U.S. to have a Shia republic gravitate to any extent towards Iran (a possibility somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Iraqi Shia are mainly Arabs, not Persians). We believe the relevant sub-national groups, the Kurds and the Shia, can be brought to understand that the best choice is to work together to reconstruct their devastated lands, rather than working separately towards the same goal. Given what must be a desperate longing for peace after devastating wars of the last twenty-three years, and the rapid mounting of a massive reconstruction plan, the U.S. has a substantial opportunity to avoid the immediate dismantling of Iraq. 

One must consider the territorial integrity of Iraq when confronting the question of the structures of the future government. The first issue is whether Iraq is to be a unitary or federal state. Given the suffering of the Kurds and Shia, they are likely to insist on autonomy. Immediately the danger emerges that we have an essentially fictive federalism like that in Bosnia, where to date there have existed three nominally federated but in fact semi-independent states. If the difficulty in Iraq is not just to protect the rights of the minority, but also to enable the government to achieve vital collective goals, minority rights must be balanced against the requirements of coherent action. 

Consequently, federalism in Iraq should not be accompanied by radical autonomy for the various sub-groups, but rather by measures that hold the country together symbolically as well as materially. Potentially, the former may best be accomplished by the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The Hasemites are hardly perfect, but as symbols for the Iraqi nation one could do worse, and there are no other monarchs waiting in the wings. The king of Spain played an important legitimating role in Spain’s transition to democracy, as has the Afghan monarch currently, and in general, a highly significant percentage of the world’s democracies are in fact constitutional monarchies. 

This strong relationship between constitutional monarchy and democracy is most likely a result of the fact that the optimal path to democracy is a relatively peaceful one, avoiding radical breaks with the past (e.g. beheading a monarch). This merely illustrates the point that a monarch preserves the symbolic past, locating the powers of symbolism in an arena where they can’t threaten democracy. The Hasemites would constitute a useful fiction, in Plato’s terms a noble myth. Alternatively, as Bagehot so eloquently demonstrated in his work on the English constitution, it is useful to separate the dignified from the efficient aspects of the government, where the Hasemites can be the dignified governmental institution. 

This noble myth is especially important, because Iraq’s need for a coherent government is going to be strained by what is sure to be, compared to the previous despotism, a massive devolution of power to the regions. At the executive-legislative level, this calls for a system of government like the French Fourth Republic, also called Parliamentary Presidentialism, in which an elected president embodying the electoral, rather than symbolic, realm of politics is controlled by the need to maintain the confidence of parliament. Straight presidentialism has often proved fatal to democracy, as a president lacking the confidence, that is to say a majority, of the parliament has resorted to undemocratic means to achieve his objectives. The requirement that the presidentially appointed Premier of a Cabinet have a working majority in Parliament can, with the right electoral laws, induce cooperation. This is critical for Iraq, because the real problem now that we have defeated autocracy is to reconstruct a democratic state that actually functions, which is going to require a strong central government. We note here that the authors of the Federalist Papers had no doubt about the importance of placing central control above a very necessary and significant amount of local control. 

In Iraq, the crux of the matter is the legislature. In a general sense, given the initial conditions in Iraq, proportional representation will literally generate multiple parties. In fact, no matter the electoral law, given the disjointed ethnic structure of Iraq, we can expect at least three parties. What we want to avoid is an Italian or Israeli situation in which effective action seems impossible, because if legitimate democratic channels fail, and a decision still must be made, then the rule of law could easily break down with a newly democratizing society. 

There are essentially two options for achieving this aim. One is bicameralism, in which the federal aspect of the Iraqi constitution is embodied in an institution akin to our Senate. The other is a unicameral Parliament, in which the seats are selected on the basis of two types of constituencies, one representing the percentage of the vote of the country as a whole, the other representing the votes of the territorially based districts. We prefer the latter institution, as we see the biggest danger for Iraq lying in the possibility that a new democratic government is unable to achieve legitimacy due to its inability to function. If we have two houses of government, we add one more place where policymaking can bog down. 

While hoping to avoid anarchy, we must also strive to avoid majoritarian tyranny. The Kurds will fight for their freedom, the Sunni will fight to prevent Shia hegemony, and the Shia will fight any backsliding from democracy that threatens their new freedom. Reconciling these competing aims will not be easy. What is needed from the electoral law is a system that provides incentives for cooperation across ethnic lines while preserving minority rights. Here we believe voting laws can be designed to interact with legislative laws to induce cooperation. In general, if voting rules in Parliament of an ethnically divided society are such that 50% takes all, minority rights are likely to be trampled on. Thus, within the Iraqi Parliament, the voting rules should be supermajoritarian. At the same time, however, the higher the required majority, the more likely deadlock is, a possibility there is good reason to wish to avoid. 

The researching of optimal voting rules is a science within itself. It can be shown that the use of what political scientists refer to as the “Golden Section” as the required majority yields decisive outcomes without dictatorship (Rich, forthcoming). In the case of Iraq, subscription to the “Golden Section” means that 61% of the vote in Parliament wins (note the similarity to the cloture vote in the U.S. Senate). Moving to the composition of the Parliament, we recommend that the “Golden Ratio” be applied to the percentage of seats selected in a single national member district with a 10% threshold for entry into Parliament. This would mean that 61% of the seats would be selected on a national proportional representation basis, the remainder selected in single member districts. 

Laying out the moderately technical proposal above, we elaborate the logic a little farther. The general impetus behind the Golden Section as a criterion for dividing the electorate up is that in any dichotomous decision, there is a winning and losing side. Especially in an ethnically divided democracy, it is important to avoid two types of problems. The first is that with straight majoritarianism, the losing side can have 49% of the vote and feel as if it is nonetheless permanently excluded from power. The converse problem is that with a strict supermajority, the majority can in effect feel stymied by a small minority. Either way, you have a recipe for tension. Use of the Golden Ratio divides winners and losers such that the ratio of the winning side to the whole is the same as the ratio of the winning side to the losing side, a symmetry property that is possessed only the Golden Ratio. By dividing voting in the Parliament and voting for the Parliament in the suggested fashion, all sides will need to reach across ethnic boundaries without giving any group a total veto. We would also recommend the restriction of participation in the Parliament to those parties receiving 10% of the vote in order to preclude the early fractionation of the Iraqi political system. 

Two matters of special importance remain, that of control of the armed forces, and that of religion. Especially in a country like Iraq, control of the armed forces must be seen as possessed by no single group. We recommend an ancient, and therefore tested, plan: that of consuls. Invented by the Spartans, in the form of dual kingship, and perfected by the Romans, the consuls could veto each other’s actions. In our case, there are three consuls, one per major ethnic group, who can veto troop movements above the regimental scale. Standing beside but apart from the executive, and elected from the regional units, the three consuls would inspire confidence in the Shia and Kurds, and ensure that the Army would not be used as an instrument of repression. Although in general we feel that the risks of disintegration outweigh the risks of centralization, the armed forces are a special case given the peculiarly loathsome nature of the previous regime. Thus, while consuls do preclude the use of force to prevent secession, they also make such secession less likely. 

Finally, we come to the very serious issue of religion and state. We say religion, because Islam is not nearly as centrally organized as the term “Church” would imply, especially for the Sunni. It has recently become very apparent observe that the Shia are justifiably restive. Given the extraordinary brutality of the previous regime, this is no surprise. The Shia will fight to avoid any dimunition of their newly experienced freedoms. Islam does not envision the separation of church and state that we are accustomed to in the West. Mohammed was not just a prophet, but a soldier, and as there was no equivalent of the Reformation in Islamic history, there is not a strong sense that religion and government are appropriately different realms of action. There is no equivalent statement from Mohammed along the lines of “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render unto God what is God’s.” Indeed, the Muslim’s duty is to forbid the wrong and enjoin the right. 

This religious tradition poses two important problems. It is not in the interest of the U.S. to have a Shia theocracy in Iraq. In no uncertain terms, Shia elites and masses should be made to understand that America’s friends are democrats, not theocrats, and that we will not materially support the construction of an Islamic state. That said, we should emphasize that the United States respects the special, prominent role that Islam will play in any Iraqi regime, and emphasize to the Shia that they are best protected by not overreaching. 

Institutionally, we recommend that there be acknowledgement of the Shar’ia law, on a voluntary basis. That is to say that individuals may chose to be tried in Shar’i courts, subject to civil approval of the verdict, but that they cannot be forced to do so. Shar’i courts should not be given a symmetrical veto power. Thus, we can respect the traditions of Islamic law, without endorsing the wholesale transfer of power to radical clerics. We cannot overemphasize the importance of the context in which the U.S. lobbies for such an institutionalization of limits on the public role of religion. We must not appear to be the enemy of Islam, but rather the guarantor of minority and majority rights. We must emphasize to the Shia how they cannot count on our support for dominating Iraq, and how such a course is unwise for the Shia themselves to follow, as there is no guarantee that the current Shia advantage will remain unchallengeable. In a more general sense, the U.S. government should strongly support crosscultural and inter-disciplinary exchanges that bring together American legal scholars, Islamic judges, and Islamic specialists so that lessons learned in Iraq may be applied over time elsewhere, as there very well may be a wave of challenges to other current political regimes in the Middle East, in light of the crushing nature of the Iraqi defeat. 

Summing up, we believe that an Iraq that is a constitutional monarchy with a presidential-parliamentary type of political regime and a legislature that is selected on the basis outlined above offers the best hope for a stable democratic Iraq. Such an Iraq is going to have to have a special, though not unlimited, role for the Shar’ia law. Some would argue that engineering as an adjective lends a false sense of precision to the exercise. Although in one sense the reflexivity of social life, that cause and effect are peculiarly intertwined in human action, makes engineering too ambitious a word, there is nonetheless an extensive social science literature on the effects of political institutions on political performance. Given the urgent need for the U.S. to leave Iraq, and the need for the rapid construction of Iraqi political institutions, we must use such information to do our best. 

We do not, of course, propose to impose such a constitution, rather, we suggest we present this as a model constitution for locally elected delegates to an Iraqi constitutional conference. The election of local officials would thereby help establish electoral machinery, the nuts and bolts of which can be rather important, as our own experience in Florida demonstrates. Through several meetings, over the course of two years, we believe Iraqi political institutions will coalesce such that our constitutional framework can be implemented. That leads to our last point, which is that to ensure that the previous autocracy’s ruling elite do not benefit from their past organizational power, the only group that may not participate in the construction of Iraqi political institutions are non-low level Baathists. 

We believe that an Iraq following a program similar to the one we have outlined herein has a good chance of constructing a bright and peaceful future, a monument that will comfort Americans and Iraqis mourning the Second Persian Gulf War’s dead.