Iraq, the newest democracy in the Middle East, has turned down an invitation to attend today’s investiture ceremony for the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. It thus keeps company with a litany of repressive governments that have declined invitations to the ceremony, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Tunisia and Venezuela.
The Nobel Prize committee has said that at least 44 of the 65 embassies invited to attend the honors have accepted, but it offered no explanation for why a nascent Arab democracy that owes its political opening not just to American intervention but also to the will of its own people would not attend the ceremony.
Maybe this explains it: Chinese investment in Iraq. Earlier this year, the government in Beijing cancelled $6.8 billion of Iraqi debt (about 80 percent of the total owed from Saddam’s era) and entered into $3.8 billion worth of trade deals. China also has a major stake in Iraqi oil fields, having won shares in three of 11 oil field contracts put up for bid. This investment also includes a 37 percent stake in the Rumaila field, which contains up to 16 billion barrels of oil and may be “the biggest oil job in the world,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
These surely weren’t the only concerns Baghdad had when deciding how to fill out the RSVP card for today’s ceremony. It may also have been distracted by its latest struggles to form a government, not to mention the necessities of constructing an independent foreign policy suited for today’s global power structure. Even so, the decision to pass on the ceremony seems a betrayal of what truly matters for Iraq’s future: respect for representative government, open debate, concern for human rights, and, above all, the importance of dissent. If Iraq wants to take up a bigger role on the regional stage, let alone a global one, it needs to do so on a foundation of democratic thought and practice.
This is not simply an appeal to Iraqi altruism. Studies have repeatedly shown that democracy advances the prosperity Iraq so desperately needs to succeed as a country. As Morton Halperin, Joseph T. Siegle and Michael M. Weinstein noted in The Democracy Advantage, “Democracies and democratizing countries have outperformed their authoritarian counterparts on a full range of development indicators. . . . Democracies at all income levels have typically achieved results that are 20 percent to 40 percent superior to those of autocracies.”
In this context, the Iraqi government’s refusal to attend the Nobel ceremony is a small but telling indicator of a worrisome trend. It is even more troubling in light of Iraq’s March 2010 election campaign, in which one of the prime issues was Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s emerging authoritarian tendency.
The United States needs to leave a positive political legacy behind as the countdown to its final withdrawal from Iraq proceeds. Thus it must make support for Iraq’s democracy—symbolically, politically and practically—a major theme of its policy.
If the United States does so, and if it finds cooperative partners in the government of Iraq, then Liu Xiaobo—imprisoned for “subversion of state power,” essentially the charge for which Nouri al-Maliki and many others were exiled (or tortured or killed)—might enjoy the moral and political comfort of a nation that is emerging from tyranny and charting a path to a brighter future in the Middle East. That would be a worthy American legacy indeed.