Citistates Group

Peter Kenney is the last person in America you would expect to have volunteered to serve in Iraq. He’s way past the age of military service, a long-serving public official active in local and regional affairs in the Denver region, a much sought-after consultant on linking better neighborhoods to better governments — and, a certifiable homebody. Has roots, likes them. But Peter is in Baghdad.

Other Americans are there to restore security or oil flows, to rebuild bombed-out streets, sewers and buildings. Peter’s a key member of a RTI group with a USAID contract to build something Baghdad citizens never had — local government as working democracy. He’s been there since last summer, surviving hotel bombings, fast journeys through narrow streets in Chevy Tahoes, and several combat-style airport arrivals and departures.

His biggest obstacle, ironically, may be American discomfort with democracy.

Let’s be clear here: as long as anxiety is the daily companion of every American stationed in Iraq, trust and patience will be in short supply. Plus, in an election year, you can understand how officers of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) would want to make every process as predictable as possible.

RTI is training Baghdad citizens to hold office, collect taxes, and run vital local and regional services. For some policy directions, Peter’s group suggested town meetings. With all the nervousness over media scrutiny and the possibility that Al Jazeera would get a shot of someone saying the word “elections,” the temptation, Peter reports, is to hold top-down meetings. Presentations from the front of the room. People seated theater-style, to listen, raise hands to ask questions. Kenney characterizes this as “a sea of stony faces staring up at a stage full of bosses telling them what to think.”

To the CPA’s credit, they gave Kenney and his RTI colleagues a chance to run a test meeting — a January 22 session with round tables set up for small group discussions.
Here’s Kenney’s report: “We had about 100 people at 12 tables and the sight of them in rapt conversation about the future of a free Iraq was something to see. We had one table where there was a Sunni sheik, four Shia sheiks, a very conservative veiled woman, and four very western-looking women. This is the kind of mix you don’t see in Iraq. The Sunni sheik went on for about four minutes about how he shouldn’t have to sit at a table with women and that he should only sit with other tribal leaders. Immediately someone else said that it wouldn’t do them any good if the sheiks all sat together and gave the same speeches to each other about traditional values and they would do better if they had one sheik at every table.”

Iraqis then fired away at the most contentious issues to be settled in the making of a real democracy — including dealing with tribal and ethnic differences and the role of women. They argued plenty but worked to find the common ground. Here were citizens sensing they had a responsibility to make good judgments on behalf of their neighbors.

I’m not sure whether the underlying irony here is erased or magnified by acknowledging that the same cautious preference for top-down government meetings, for the obligatory hearings after a plan is complete, is the contemporary American experience as well. The serious citizen engagement efforts — from efforts like Envision Utah to a growing demand for the sort of charrettes produced around the country by Dover, Kohl and Partners — are still exceptions to a resistant rule.

Baghdad or Salt Lake City, the test is whether it’s a truly round table, gathering people who do not easily agree, finding them forging sensible solutions. Too bad the attention of major media in Iraq seems fixated on the tragedy of daily casualties, because the story that might become history’s enduring narrative is being born in these small meetings where people are getting a taste of democracy.