Iraqi elections may not be what they seem

With international monitors absent on the ground in Iraq, it is difficult to divine what actually happened in Iraq. On critical issues, these days the American press prints only the official version. Therefore, the figures for the percentage of Iraqis voting and their joy at it as depicted in the American media, have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Did the Iraqis know what they were voting for, anyway? The answer may surprise you.

In his op-ed piece on January 31, The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes:

"And 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."

As John F. Burns put it in The Times yesterday:

"Half a dozen candidates have been assassinated. As a result, the names of all others have not been made public; they were available in the last days of the campaign on Web sites inaccessible to most Iraqis, few of whom own computers."

"Democracy," according to "The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World," "refers to a form of government in which, in contradistinction to monarchies and aristocracies, the people rule."

That is not the case in Iraq and is not likely to be the case soon. In much of Iraq the people exist in a kind of hell on earth, at the mercy of American forces on the one hand and a variety of enraged insurgents on the other. Despite the pretty words coming out of the Bush administration, the goals of the U.S. and the goals of most ordinary Iraqis are not, by a long stretch, the same.

The desire of the U.S., as embodied by the Bush administration, is to exercise as much control as possible over the Middle East and its crucial oil reserves. There is very little concern here about the plight of ordinary Iraqis, which is why the horrendous casualties being suffered by Iraqi civilians, including women and children, get so little attention.

What most ordinary Iraqis have been expressing, not surprisingly, is a desire for a reasonably decent quality of life. They are a long way from that.

In large swaths of the country, death at the hands of insurgents seems always just moments away. It's also extremely easy for innocent Iraqis to get blown away by Americans. That can occur if drivers get too close - or try to pass - an American military convoy. Or if confusion arising from language barriers, or ignorance of the rules, or just plain nervousness results in an unfortunate move by a vehicle at a checkpoint. Or if someone objects too vociferously to degrading treatment by U.S. forces. Or if someone is simply suspected, wrongly, of being an insurgent.

Crime in many areas is completely out of control. Kidnapping for ransom, including the kidnapping of children, is ubiquitous. Carjackings are commonplace. Rape and murder are widespread.

In a country with the second-largest oil reserves in the world, drivers have to wait in line for hours at a time for gasoline. Electric power is available just a handful of hours a day. Unemployment rates are sky high. With many women destitute, prostitution is a growth industry.

Iraqis may have voted... But they live in occupied territory, and the occupiers have other things on their minds than the basic wishes of the Iraqi people. That's not democracy. That's a recipe for more war."

All the Iraqi candidates running for office were approved by the occupying power, America. It should, therefore, not be automatically assumed that those who did vote were converts to the American version of democracy, as Bob Herbert points out. The majority Shiite Arabs in the south may have seen the voting as an excellent opportunity to grab power. The Kurds in the north may have looked at the election as the first step towards independence. And as is well-known, the Sunni Arabs in the middle pretty much boycotted the election. With the three factions in Iraq viewing the election in conflicting terms, conflict is what will result. The simmering tensions will now boil over, and will probably result in the disintegration of Iraq once the American soldiers leave.

America did succeed in planting democracy on the soil of Germany and Japan after defeating them in World War II; America even wrote Japan's constitution giving women equal rights. But, Germany and Japan were the aggressors in WW II, who were defeated by America and the Allies. America is the aggressor in Iraq. After the American occupation of Germany and Japan, there was no resistance or insurgency against the occupiers. By all estimate, the insurgency in Iraq is only intensifying. History is not on the side of democracy when the occupying power attempts to install it in a country where insurgency is surging. To de-legitimize the Awami League's absolute triumph in the elections of December 1970, the Pakistani occupiers held an "election" in the middle of Mukti Bahini insurgency in the autumn of 1971 in "East Pakistan." They did not quite succeed, did they? The US, too, held elections in South Vietnam. Most of those that ran for and won office were either killed after the US's withdrawal, or left long before the last helicopter took off from the top of the US Embassy in Saigon in April 1975.

While many Americans were as euphoric as the Bush administration over the Iraqi elections, several remained circumspect. Here is a sampling of opinion in the Letters to the Editor page of The New York Times on February 1. Wrote one reader: "An election held while planes of the conquering power fly overhead is not free, and its results not legitimate." Wrote another: "did the ends truly justify the ends? The Bush administration now claims that the war in Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction but rather to install democracy and freedom in Iraq for the sake of American security. Did such a goal require a war? Surely this could have been achieved through peaceful means without the loss of so much blood and treasure." Lamented another: "Relatively free elections in Iraq are undoubtedly a good thing, but there remains an inconvenient fact, a fact that I fear will be left out of our history textbooks but remembered, repeated and fetishized by America's enemies. Tens of thousands of Iraqis civilians who had never harmed the United States and did not choose to die for democracy have died on their own soil as a direct result of our government's actions. Sugarcoating or forgetting this fact as we celebrate the elections dishonors all those people who didn't get to vote because they are no longer alive. Ignorance of this troubling truth will also hinder Americans in the future as we try to understand a long-running "war on terror."

Finally, another reader wrote: "nothing can justify what the United States has done in Iraq under the Bush administration. Morality does not work that way. It was wrong for us to attack another sovereign nation. People who claim moral values should know the basic principle that the ends do not justify the means. We who have done this evil or in whose name it has been done are obliged to do what we can to make restitution." The best course for America to follow is to withdraw from Iraq and let the Iraqis sort out their problems. And as the last letter writer wisely suggests, as the Iraqis reconstruct their nation, including the America-flattened historic city of Fallujah, and their shattered lives, America should pay compensation to the families of the dead and fund the reconstruction of Iraq's infrastructure destroyed by the American invasion, occupation and incessant aerial bombing. With such generosity, America will regain its prestige not only in the Arab-Muslim world, but in the rest of the world as well.