While a number of variables may coalesce to influence the shape of democracy being developed in Iraq today, culture is likely to have the greatest impact upon this process. Iraq is not a single entity, but rather an artificially created country populated with various and diverse ethnic and religious groups (i.e., Kurds and Arabs, Shi'ites and Sunnis) (Tripp, 2003). Each of these groups has an interest in access to the mechanisms of power and influence that will operate within the government.
Under Saddam Hussein, conflicts and tensions between these various cultural groups were repressed, and a relatively stable society was maintained (Ware, 2005). Kurdish nationalism was especially targeted in a bloody attack involving the use of biological weapons (Ware, 2005). Additionally, as Sodaro (2004) has commented, Saddam Hussein ensured that the minority religious sect would dominate politics in Iraq and all other important sectors of society. With the demise of Hussein's regime, many of the heretofore tensions simmering in Iraq have erupted.
Sodaro (2004), writing of the myriad factors impacting upon the process of democratization now underway in post-Saddam Iraq, argues that the most critical variable with the potential to disrupt or even inhibit this process is related to cultural diversity. Iraq, an artificially created country constructed out of elements of the Ottoman Empire, has long been plagued by internecine civil conflicts, violent clashes among disparate internal groups (e.g., Kurds and Arabs, Sunnis and Shi'ites) and between Iraq itself and its neighbors (Iran and Kuwait). Since its independence from the British Protectorate established in 1920 by the League of Nations, Iraq has experienced alternating periods of monarchial rule under the Hashemites, military coups, dictatorships, and invasion in recent years by a U.S.-led coalition (Tripp, 2002). Certainly, as Samir al-Khalil (1989) commented in a pre-Gulf War te...