Davis 411hile the creation of a nascent civil society and public sphere in W
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is relatively easy to docu-
ment, can this rich tradition be translated into a political praxis that can
help offset the pernicious legacy of Saddam Husayn’s Ba‘thist regime, the
impact of the largely incompetent United States occupation of Iraq, and
the rise to power of sectarian political organizations? One tool that has
not been theorized adequately, nor used as a form of public policy, is his-
torical memory. Certainly Saddam and the Ba‘th Party realized the power
of historical memory as evidenced by the resources the regime devoted to
its Project for the Rewriting of History, of which Saddam was the titular
head. Saddam and the Ba‘th sought to use historical memory to restruc-
ture the Iraqi citizenry’s understandings of the past. While the results of
the Ba‘thist regime’s efforts were uneven, the question is whether a differ-
ent type of historical memory, one that promotes a growth of the public
sphere and civil society and a transition to democracy, can be deployed
for these desired ends.
e core of the ideas proposed here is for democratic practitioners, Th
both inside and outside Iraq, to mobilize the progressive historical mem-
ory of the pre-1963 era to promote democratic change as part of a process
of invigorating the public sphere. A key principle underlying these ideas
is that the democratic transition should be derived from the Iraqi histori-
cal experience and not one imposed from without.^46 Another important
component of political praxis is to link the development of the public
sphere during the twentieth century to new forms of the public sphere in
post-Ba‘thist Iraq. Because many radical forces claim that there is no tra-
dition in Iraqi political culture that valorizes democratic practices, and by
extension the notions of a tolerant civil society and active public sphere,
these groups argue that democracy is alien to Iraq and a tradition that the
West, particularly the United States, is trying to impose on Iraq.
Media
One manner in which both progressive forces within the Iraqi govern-
ment and those in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can help pro-
mote the public sphere’s reconstitution is through the use of the media
and the Internet to disseminate the accomplishments of the pre-Ba‘thist