Practice doesn’t make perfect

The legendary Roy Rees literally wrote the book on coaching soccer, which featured his famous line, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.” Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki visited the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today, along with U.S. National Security Advisor General James L. Jones (Ret.), and the Chairman of the Iraq National Investment Commission, Dr. Sami Al-Araji to highlight the economic opportunities for U.S. businesses in Iraq. The pressure’s now on the Iraqi business community. Have they been practicing?

Iraq’s struggle to develop as a market-based democracy is a crucial bellwether for the region. To accelerate development toward authentic markets and democracy, nothing is more effective than increasing the breadth and depth of organized groups with a stake in the democratic process. That process requires practice, and believe it or not, many in the Iraqi business community have been putting in their time. There’s a growing network of independent business associations from the provincial level upwards, representing a broadly-shared interest in strengthening Iraqi democracy through private enterprise and market-oriented reform. The network’s continued progress in that regard contributes uniquely to Iraq’s development and to the case for democracy in the Middle East.

The network is growing in numbers and in the strength of its relationships, increasing its capacity to forge shared policy priorities, and to present reforms to policymakers in more frequent and more effective settings. Not only would adoption of the specified reforms help Iraqi democracy to deliver, the open and productive dialogue that led to adoption becomes a precedent for policymaking, growing from discrete events with current politicians into common practices that new politicians must adopt to be successful. With each round of dialogue and each cycle of elections, the Iraqi business community quietly puts in more practice hours, in preparation for returning to the larger, international stage that Al-Maliki’s visit today foreshadows.

With the 2010 national elections drawing closer, opportunities are ripe to build on precedent and establish habits of productive dialogue between policymakers and the private sector as a basis for decision-making on both sides. Economic policymaking is unceasingly complex, and only more so the larger an economy gets to be. Representative business organizations help elected officials sort through the mess and find concrete, actionable reforms that improve wider and wider swaths of their electorate.

Over the past six years, the network of representative business organizations has repeatedly proven its growing effectiveness in providing a clear and authoritative voice from the private sector to policymakers and Iraqi society as a whole. They are now on their way to becoming institutions of authentic democratic processes that will outlive individual contributions or intermittent aid. They’re not perfect, and no institution is, but with each passing day they get closer to becoming permanent.