Democracy never arrived anywhere impeccable and fully dressed. Not in ancient Greece, nor in modern Europe and North America.
Democracy is a tedious process, often flawed, requiring patient work for improvement and a lot of luck. Democracy is a journey, rarely a destination to step down and call it over.
It is a messy journey, frequently accompanied with disquiet, often beginning in quarrels amidst smoke and blood, and no one is ever content with the nature of the journey, the direction taken or the distance travelled.
But whatever the discontent, there is a near global consensus, today painfully reached, that despite democracy’s flaws there is no better alternative.
The simple definition offered by Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president—in the midst of a civil war that was the bloodiest conflict of the 19th century—that democracy is government “of the people, by the people, for the people” perhaps cannot be improved upon.
Yet democracy as an idea and as a form of government remains contested.
One of Canada’s highly respected political philosophers, the late C.B. Macpherson of the University of Toronto, devoted his 1964 CBC Massey Lectures to the subject of democracy. He began by observing, “There is a good deal of muddle about democracy… At bottom, the muddle about democracy is due to a genuine confusion as to what democracy is supposed to be about.”
If the West, despite its long and rich experience with democracy as politics and culture, still remains “muddled” about it, then the situation elsewhere—particularly in the Arab-Muslim world—is terribly bleak, given the absence of or scant experience with democracy when it comes to putting together the bare minimum of a representative government.
The democratic journey is hazardous, and yet it is the only proven path for any people striving to live in a decent society. Despite endless arguments about democracy’s flaws, its opponents and enemies have failed to do better in measurable terms than the achievements anywhere of an imperfect democracy at work.
In Iraq, the anguish of a people wrestling with the promises of democracy is unmistakably visible in the daily toll of death and destruction wrought by its enemies. Iraq is the evidence for those who forget how high are the costs of democracy, and how implacable is the enemy of freedom.
But on what basis can anyone make the argument that the costs of building a democratic society in Iraq have become too steep and should be abandoned? Will anyone credibly argue that the costs for keeping the United States together through the civil war and in ending slavery were too high?
On the contrary, it can be shown that the costs of tyranny in Iraq were unbearably high—as is being demonstrated in the ongoing trials of Saddam Hussein, which the mainstream media in the West are barely reporting.
The Iraqi dictator was recently found guilty for the killings of 148 Shiites in Dujail during the 1980s. His sentence, very likely the death penalty, will be announced in October.
A second trial has opened. Saddam is charged in the 1987-88 campaign against the Kurds of Iraq. It was an Iraqi version of the Final Solution to eliminate Kurds, named “Anfal”—a Koranic reference meaning “spoils of war.”
Human Rights Watch estimated between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds (men, women and children) were killed by the orders of Saddam. The evidence at the trial is massive, indisputable and mostly recovered from the archives of his regime.
The list of Saddam’s crimes is immensely long. The shame of the Arab-Muslim world has been its silence over the years of what took place in Saddam’s Iraq, just as it presently remains silent over the rape and murder taking place in Darfur.
Iraqis know too well on which side of the ledger—tyranny or democracy—the costs are higher, and it is unlikely they will abandon their freedom journey after the distance they have traveled since Saddam Hussein was toppled.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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