Joe was anticipating that I might rain on the "Iraq is a Democracy" parade and who am I to disappoint him? After all, I know from the experience of the 2000 election that voting doesn't guarantee democracy. I agree with Bob Herbert that:
You'd have to be pretty hardhearted not to be moved by the courage of the millions of Iraqis who insisted on turning out to vote yesterday despite the very real threat that they would be walking into mayhem and violent death at the polls.
...we should keep in mind that despite the feelings of pride and accomplishment experienced by so many of the voters, yesterday's election was hardly a textbook example of democracy in action. A real democracy requires an informed electorate. What we saw yesterday was an uncommonly brave electorate. But it was woefully uninformed.
Much of the electorate was voting blind. Half or more of those who went to the polls believed they were voting for a president. They weren't. They were electing a transitional national assembly that will have as its primary task the drafting of a constitution. The Washington Post noted that because of the extreme violence that preceded the election "almost none of the 7,700 candidates for the National Assembly campaigned publicly or even announced their names."
Politics of Dissent offers six reasons why the elections cannot be called "a resounding success" as President Bush would have us believe. They're all quite sharp - the one I think is most incisive:
while exit polls of questionable accuracy indicate a 60% turn-out by registered voters, there are entire regions of Iraq that never had the opportunity to register. As of January 29, the eve of the elections, neither the residents of Falluja nor Mosul were registered to vote or even provided with the forms to do so. Iraq’s third largest city, Mosul is home to nearly three million Iraqis. With at least three million disenfranchised Iraqis, and with millions of Sunni Iraqis boycotting the elections, the legitimacy of the elections comes into serious question.
(Remember the animosity and divisiveness that resulted from the United States’ 2000 Presidential Election? Imagine the millions of democrats who disavowed Bush as their president. Imagine the millions of republicans who condemned these democrats as sore losers and against the democratic process. Now imagine both sides armed to the teeth and, partly as a result of deep ideological differences, willing to kill and die for their respective causes. Now amplify that by a factor of ten and you have just imagined the tip of the iceberg in Iraq.)
Fareed Zakaria makes the point that elections do not translate into democracy much more directly, suggesting that the preconditions for establishing a proper democracy in Iraq remain unfulfilled:
...no matter how the voting turns out, the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim. Unless there is a major change in course, Iraq is on track to become another corrupt, oil-rich quasi-democracy, like Russia and Nigeria.
First, you need to avoid major ethnic or religious strife... This has not happened. Instead the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds are increasingly wary of one another and are thinking along purely sectarian lines. This "groupism" also overemphasizes the religious voices in these communities, and gives rise to a less secular, less liberal kind of politics.
Second, create a non-oil-based economy and government. When a government has easy access to money, it doesn't need to create a real economy. In fact, it doesn't need its citizens because it doesn't tax them. The result is a royal court, distant and detached from its society.
..."There is little doubt that Iraq is now using its oil wealth for general revenues," says Isam al Khafaji, who worked for the CPA briefly and now runs Iraq Revenue Watch for the Open Society Institute. "Plus, the Iraqi government now has two sources of easy money. If the oil revenues aren't enough, there's Uncle Sam. The United States is spending its money extremely unwisely in Iraq."
...The rule of law is the final, crucial condition. Without it, little else can work.
...The United States has essentially stopped trying to build a democratic order in Iraq and is simply trying to fight the insurgency and gain some stability and legitimacy. In doing so, if that exacerbates group tensions, corruption, cronyism, and creates an overly centralized regime, so be it.
Finally, to all this I add, at what cost? We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars with no real end in sight; we've killed close to 100,000 civilians, we've lost hundreds of young men and women and thousands more are maimed; large portions of the country remain largely unstable - a withdrawal of US forces is very likely to erupt in civil war. Do we really expect the violence to go away and democracy to flourish because they had a vote - not on a leader or a government - but on a constitutional committee?
Unlike Joe, I like to dig a little deeper than the Bush talking points. Too bad much of the media can't do the same.
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