This seems to be a point of contention this week. Will elections be held in Iraq, as the current administration insists, in January, or will they have to be delayed? If they are held, will they be flawed? Are the insurgents in central Iraq trying to sabotage those elections?
To the first question, the administration says "yes, they will be held"; its opponents, and they are legion, say that this can't happen. On this one, I'd have to give the administration points. After all, elections have been held before under difficult conditions. The very first elections in the United States, a decade or more before we adopted the Constitution, were held when large parts of the country were still under enemy occupation. No reason Iraqis can't bear up to such adversity today at least as well as we could then.
To the second question, the administration says "no, they won't be flawed". This is nonsense. The question is not whether they will be flawed, but how badly they will be flawed. As General Abizaid said on Meet the Press yesterday: "I can't predict 100 percent that all areas will be available for complete, free, fair and peaceful elections. I assume that there will be certain areas of [Iraq] that will have to be fought over in order to have the elections take place." We ourselves are familiar with flawed elections (see, for example, the one that put the current president in office). All you can do is try (with apparently limited success) to ensure that the same flaws won't occur again, bear up with the idiots you've been saddled with for a limited amount of time (a practice that Americans have shown themselves good at ― we are, I think, a tolerant people when it comes to crooks being put in charge), and hope that the future will bring you something better. (1)
As to the third question, if you can believe Secretary of State Colin Powell, then yes. Powell is quoted today as saying: "They are determined to disrupt the election. They do not want the Iraqi people to vote for their own leaders in a free, democratic election." Despite his pathetic performance at the United Nations back in February, 2002, Powell remains probably the most trustworthy spokesman for our current administration ― though admittedly this is not saying much. Furthermore, the nature of the insurrection ― which is essentially Sunni Moslem in nature ― supports this. Iraq's population is something like 60% Shi'a Moslem; Sunnis may, with some justice, expect that a free election would produce a Shi'a government and, effectively, a Shi'a state in which Sunnis will be dealt the short end of the stick. It would not be surprising to find them battling not only against what they consider (correctly) to be an alien occupation force, but also against unbridled democracy in their own country. (2)
(1) You want to be careful, of course, that you are not stuck with a democratically-elected "president for life" or something like that. Cuba, which is nowhere near as awful a place as administrations of both political stripes have liked to pretend for going on half a century now, has had to live with the same "democratically-elected" ruler for that same period of time. One may be forgiven for assuming that, in such circumstances, "democracy" is more cosmetic than real.
(2) Genuine democracy is based on two pillars: "rule of the majority" and "rights of the minority". The first could be in place in Iraq tomorrow. The second is more problematic; with two and a quarter centuries of experience behind us, we in the United States have never done all that well in this field.
I feel the war is a waste
Posted by: Alhaji at January 16, 2007 01:55 AM