02.01.2005

Naeem — A series of articles on Iraqi Elections

Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on Naeem — A series of articles on Iraqi Elections

Compliments of Shobak
A series of articles on the Iraq elections. One pro-elections (Ignatieff),
four taking a more in-between view. Ignatieff earlier wrote a NYT cover
story arguing that the new American Imperialism was benign and necessary.
Many of us may not agree with his POV, however there are some interesting
points he makes in this article– including the following two quotes:
“Support for Iraqi democracy has become the casualty of the corrosive
bitterness that still surrounds the initial decision to go to war.
“Liberals can’t bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem
to collude with neoconservative bombast. Antiwar ideologues can’t support
the Iraqis because that would require admitting that positive outcomes can
result from bad policies and worse intentions.”
-Naeem, Editor, Shobak.Org
1.The Uncommitted- Michael Ignatieff 2.The dead do not vote- Sinan Antoon
3.This election will change the world. But not in the way the Americans
imagined- Robert Fisk 4.Occupation Thwarts Democracy- John Nichols 5.Iraq’s
Lost Election
New York Times Magazine January 30, 2005 THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The Uncommitted By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
The election in Iraq is without precedent. Never, not even in the dying days
of Weimar Germany when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has
there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence
— with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into
hiding, foreign monitors forced to ”observe” the election from a nearby
country, actual voting on election day a gamble with death in at least 4 of
the 18 provinces and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates
and exiles in foreign countries.
Just as depressing as the violence in Iraq is the indifference to it abroad.
Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own
right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose
their own leaders. Why do so few people feel even a tremor of indignation
when they see poll workers gunned down in a Baghdad street? Why isn’t there
a trickle of applause in the press for the more than 6,000 Iraqis actually
standing for political office at the risk of their lives? Have we all become
so disenchanted that we need Iraqis to remind us what a free election can
actually be worth?
Explaining this morose silence requires understanding how support for Iraqi
democracy has become the casualty of the corrosive bitterness that still
surrounds the initial decision to go to war. Establishing free institutions
in Iraq was the best reason to support the war — now it is the only reason
— and for that very reason democracy there has ceased to be a respectable
cause. The administration’s ideologues — the ones who wrote the
presidential inaugural and its image of America in the service of ”the
Author of Liberty” — have managed the nearly impossible: to turn democracy
itself into a disreputable slogan. Liberals can’t bring themselves to
support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neoconservative
bombast. Meanwhile, antiwar ideologues can’t support the Iraqis because that
would require admitting that positive outcomes can result from bad policies
and worse intentions. Finally there are the ideological fools in the Arab
world and even a few here at home who think the ”insurgents” are fighting
a just war against American imperialism. All this makes you wonder when the
left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill
election workers and assassinate candidates. The right name for such people
is fascists.
What may also be silencing voices in support of Iraqi democracy is the
conventional wisdom that has been thrown over the debate on Iraq like a fire
blanket — everyone believes that Iraq is a disaster: hence elections are
doomed. As I was told by one suave European observer, with a look of
self-satisfaction on his face, all that remains is the final act. We are
waiting, he said, for the helicopters to lift off the last Americans from
the roofs of the green zone in Baghdad. For its part, the administration
sometimes seems to support the elections less to give the Iraqis a chance at
freedom than to provide what Henry Kissinger, speaking of Vietnam, called
”a decent interval” before inevitable collapse.
Beneath the fire blanket of defeatism, everyone — for and against the war
— is apparently preparing exit strategies. Those who were against tell us
that democracy can’t be imposed at gunpoint, when the actual issue is
whether it can survive being hijacked at gunpoint. Other experts tell us how
”basically” violent Iraqi society is or how tribal it is, as a way of
explaining why insurgency has taken root and democracy is dying on the vine.
A more subtle kind of condescension claims that Iraq has been scarred by
Baathism and therefore cannot produce free minds.
All this savant expertise ignores the evidence that Iraqis want free
institutions and that their leaders have fought to establish them in almost
impossible circumstances. Consider the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who
demanded democratic elections in 2003 when the victorious invaders were
talking about deferring them indefinitely. Since the beginning, Sistani has
refused either to ratify American occupation or to legitimize Shia
extremism. In the face of incessant provocation, he has marginalized men of
violence. His aides have been assassinated and his offices have been
attacked, but no calls to massacre the Sunni or the occupiers have issued
from his spokesmen. Or consider the Kurds, who put aside their factional
infighting, produced a common slate for the elections and kept their
peshmergas from seizing Kirkuk and thus saved the country from a civil war
over that ethnically mixed city. Finally, consider the moderate Sunnis, who
have joined the Allawi government and risked the fury of the Sunni
insurgents. The defeatism of Washington think tanks and newspaper editorials
misses a simple point: the only displays of political prudence and
democratic courage since the Americans rolled into Iraq in 2003 have been by
the much despised Iraqis, not their supposedly all-seeing imperial
benefactors. Since we lack the grace to admit that Iraqis have often shown
more wisdom and courage than we have, we naturally don’t trust that wisdom
and courage to save Iraq now.
The Bush administration knows that while its mistakes have cost it any real
influence in rooting democracy in Iraq, its historical reputation will
depend largely on whether freedom does take root there. Already the
revisionists are working over the facts: the best way to write the history
in advance is to shift the blame for the failure of Iraqi democracy onto the
Iraqis themselves. Those who opposed the war collude with this revisionism
in advance by giving up on the Iraqis and this, their only chance of
freedom. Let us have the decency to support people who are fighting for a
free election, and let us have the honesty not to blame them for our own
incompetence if they fail. There is still no reason to assume they will.
Michael Ignatieff is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
=== AL AHRAM Democracy and necrology The dead do not vote, writes Sinan
Antoon*. But neither, in Iraq, are they counted
Each act in the ongoing and seemingly never-ending Iraqi tragedy has a
climactic scene, at times imaginary, at times painfully real. We are now
approaching one such scene, and it could well go under the working title
“the elections”. Initially advertised as the glorious peak beyond which the
promised land of democracy lies, the climb is proving to be rocky, if not
lethal. The crescendo, as callously scripted and clumsily performed as the
overarching narrative, has been disrupted and disturbed, as it was bound to
be, by the sounds of explosions, bombings, suicide and other daily
pleasantries that accompany Rumsfeldian liberation or its Zarqawian variant.
Perhaps Iraq’s tragedy is to be plagued by too many liberators. The
discursive and rhetorical crescendo and celebratory noise is increasingly
drowned out by voices of doubt and dissent from, and on behalf of, those
excluded from the process, those who have not been assigned even a step on
which to squat backstage.
The logistical mayhem involved in all aspects of the election process and
the utter lack of security are among the many obstacles and grounds for
questions that will haunt the results for decades to come. And this is to
ignore the congenital defect of a sloppy election conceived by, and under,
military occupation and lacking even the façade of any international body
that might guarantee its legitimacy. Its ominous birthmark spells civil war
in capital letters. If anything is guaranteed by these elections it is the
institutionalisation of sectarian politics. That the international monitors
who are supposed to ensure the fairness of these elections will carry out
their task in Amman, Jordan, hundreds of miles away from the Iraqi border,
underlines just what a parody is going on.
While not all these dissenting and doubtful voices are necessarily motivated
by a genuine commitment to democracy, or a wish to ward off the spectre of a
long and bloody civil war, many of them are, and legitimately so. The irony
of ironies is that distance seems to endow the electorate with added weight.
Iraqis living in, for example, London or Detroit, most of whom are unlikely
to return to Iraq anytime soon, if at all, can have a say in these
elections. But many of those living (and dying) in Falluja, Mosul and other
towns and cities in the provinces lumped under the so-called Sunni triangle,
and who are much more likely to be immediately affected by the results of
these elections than those of us living abroad, will not be able to vote
even if they want to do so. I am not suggesting that Diaspora Iraqis should
have no say in the future of their home country, nor that they should not be
actively involved in its politics. On the contrary, and I believe that time
will show that they, like other Diaspora communities, have a critical role
to play in coming decades. But their influence and electoral weight should
not surpass that of citizens living inside Iraq.
As I write this it is being reported that of the 300,000 citizens who lived
in Falluja before its annihi/liberation, only 10,000 have returned. What
these returnees found was a city of ghosts, a city where a standing house is
a rarity.
There is no running water or electricity. Corpses were left for stray dogs
and large sectors of the city are still off limits to any and all for
obscure reasons. The grand promises of reconstruction and rehabilitation
once the city was “liberated”, issued by the US and Iyad Allawi’s regime a
few months ago, have evaporated into thin air. Families were told that they
would be given $100 as compensation for their houses and a lifetime’s worth
of belongings. What a cruel joke. I, for one, do not blame them for not
being enthusiastic about democratic horizons as they rot in refugee camps
outside the city and acclimate to the not so pleasant life of “the
internally displaced”.
It is not only Fallujans, Mosulites or even predominantly Sunnis who will
boycott the elections or be unable to vote. There is a very diverse and
representative block of voters, numbering almost 100,000, none of whom will
cast a single ballot. The dead, unless they live in Florida, cannot vote.
The figure of 100,000 is the estimated number of civilian casualties killed
since the war as suggested by a survey carried out by researchers from Johns
Hopkins, Columbia and Al-Mustansiriya universities.
The United States is “not interested” — those were Colin Powell’s words —
in the numbers of civilian deaths.
“We don’t do body counts,” said General Tommy Franks, the war hero.
Not only that, the Iraqi Health Ministry was ordered to stop its own count.
What else would one expect from a government that works very hard to shield
the citizenry from the sight of its own soldiers’ coffins returning home.
As usual, some were quick to dispute the methodology of this survey, more
concerned with technicalities than civilian deaths. Stalin was on the mark
in saying that “one death is a milestone, a million is a statistic”. Like a
drop on the screen, the story and figures were quickly cast aside, so we can
clearly see the road to freedom ahead, unadulterated. A hundred thousand
darkies do not score that high on the civilised world’s Richter scale of
compassion. There are so many other ongoing tragedies, from Darfur to
Palestine and elsewhere, on at this vast multiplex, all demanding the
attention of spectators in the civilised world. I, like many others suspect,
sometimes silently address the 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians: Had you been
birds, your disappearance might have caused much more outrage. You could
have flown en masse over a metropolis and clouded its skies for a few hours
in protest. Meteorologists and bird- watchers surely would have noticed. Had
you been trees, you would have made a beautiful forest the destruction of
which would have been deemed a crime against the planet. Had you been words,
you would have formed a precious book or manuscript the loss of which would
be mourned across the world. But you are none of these. And you had to pass
quietly and uneventfully. No one will campaign for you in these elections.
No one cares to represent you. No absentee ballots have been issued or sent.
You will have to wait decades for a monument, or a tiny museum. If you are
lucky in provoking retroactive guilt your names will be inscribed on a wall
somewhere. But until then, you may welcome more to your midst and form a
vast silent chorus of ghosts, condemning the spectators and the actors.
Exeunt Omens!
* The writer is a US-based Iraqi poet and novelist === This election will
change the world. But not in the way the Americans imagined
Robert Fisk in Baghdad
01/29/05 “The Independent” — Shias are about to inherit Iraq, but the
election tomorrow that will bring them to power is creating deep fears among
the Arab kings and dictators of the Middle East that their Sunni leadership
is under threat.
America has insisted on these elections – which will produce a largely Shia
parliament representing Iraq’s largest religious community – because they
are supposed to provide an exit strategy for embattled US forces, but they
seem set to change the geopolitical map of the Arab world in ways the
Americans could never have imagined. For George Bush and Tony Blair this is
the law of unintended consequences writ large.
Amid curfews, frontier closures and country-wide travel restrictions, voting
in Iraq will begin tomorrow under the threat of Osama bin Laden’s ruling
that the poll represents an “apostasy”. Voting started among expatriate
Iraqis yesterday in Britain, the US, Sweden, Syria and other countries, but
the turnout was much smaller than expected.
The Americans have talked up the possibility of massive bloodshed tomorrow
and US intelligence authorities have warned embassy staff in Baghdad that
insurgents may have been “saving up” suicide bombers for mass attacks on
polling stations.
But outside Iraq, Arab leaders are talking of a Shia “Crescent” that will
run from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon via Syria, whose Alawite leadership
forms a branch of Shia Islam. The underdogs of the Middle East, repressed
under the Ottomans, the British and then the pro-Western dictators of the
region, will be a new and potent political force.
While Shia political parties in Iraq have promised that they will not demand
an Islamic republic – their speeches suggest that they have no desire to
recreate the Iranian revolution in their country – their inevitable victory
in an election that Iraq’s Sunnis will largely boycott mean that this
country will become the first Arab nation to be led by Shias.
On the surface, this may not be apparent; Iyad Allawi, the former CIA agent
and current Shia “interim” Prime Minister, is widely tipped as the only
viable choice for the next prime minister – but the kings and emirs of the
Gulf are facing the prospect with trepidation.
In Bahrain, a Sunni monarchy rules over a Shia majority that staged a
mini-insurrection in the 1990s. Saudi Arabia has long treated its Shia
minority with suspicion and repression.
In the Arab world, they say that God favoured the Shia with oil. Shias live
above the richest oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and upon some of the Kuwaiti
oil fields. Apart from Mosul, Iraqi Shias live almost exclusively amid their
own country’s massive oil fields. Iran’s oil wealth is controlled by the
country’s overwhelming Shia majority.
What does all this presage for the Sunni potentates of the Arabian
peninsula? Iraq’s new national assembly and the next interim government it
selects will empower Shias throughout the region, inviting them to question
why they too cannot be given a fair share of their country’s
decision-making.
The Americans originally feared that parliamentary elections in Iraq would
create a Shia Islamic republic and made inevitable – and unnecessary –
warnings to Iran not to interfere in Iraq. But now they are far more
frightened that without elections the 60 per cent Shia community would join
the Sunni insurgency.
Tomorrow’s poll is thus, for the Americans, a means to an end, a way of
claiming that – while Iraq may not have become the stable, liberal democracy
they claimed they would create – it has started its journey on the way to
Western-style freedom and that American forces can leave.
Few in Iraq believe that these elections will end the insurgency, let alone
bring peace and stability. By holding the poll now – when the Shias, who are
not fighting the Americans, are voting while the Sunnis, who are fighting
the Americans, are not – the elections can only sharpen the divisions
between the country’s two largest communities.
While Washington had clearly not envisaged the results of its invasion in
this way, its demand for “democracy” is now moving the tectonic plates of
the Middle East in a new and uncertain direction. The Arab states outside
the Shia “Crescent” fear Shia political power even more than they are
frightened by genuine democracy.
No wonder, then, King Abdullah of Jordan is warning that this could
destabilise the Gulf and pose a “challenge” to the United States. This may
also account for the tolerant attitude of Jordan towards the insurgency,
many of whose leaders freely cross the border with Iraq.
The American claim that they move secretly from Syria into Iraq appears
largely false; the men who run the rebellion against US rule in Iraq are not
likely to smuggle themselves across the Syrian-Iraqi desert when they can
travel “legally” across the Jordanian border.
Tomorrow’s election may be bloody. It may well produce a parliament so
top-heavy with Shia candidates that the Americans will be tempted to “top
up” the Sunni assembly members by choosing some of their own, who will
inevitably be accused of collaboration. But it will establish Shia power in
Iraq – and in the wider Arab world – for the first time since the great
split between Sunnis and Shias that followed the death of the Prophet
Muhammad.
©2005 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd === THE NATION Occupation Thwarts
Democracy
01/29/2005 @ 5:02pm
Under pressure from the Bush Administration, political parties campaigning
in this weekend’s so-called “election” in Iraq did not proposed timetables
for the withdrawal of US troops from their homeland.
This constraint upon the debate effectively denied the Iraqi people an
honest choice. Polls suggest that the majority of Iraqis favor the quick
withdrawal of US forces, yet the voters of that battered land were cheated
out of a campaign that could have allowed them to send a clear signal of
opposition to the occupation.
Despite this disconnect, when the voting was done, Administration aides
declared a victory in President’s Bush’s crusade for “liberty.” And thus was
born the latest lie of an Administration that has built its arguments for
the invasion and occupation of Iraq on a foundation of petty deception and
gross deceit.
That democracy has been denied in Iraq is beyond question. The charade of an
election, played out against a backdrop of violence so unchecked that a
substantial portion of the electorate– particularly Sunni Muslims–avoided
the polls for reasons of personal safety, featuring candidates who dared not
speak their names and characterized by a debate so stilted that the
electorate did not know who or what it is electing.
Now that this farce of an “election” in Iraq is done, the fight for
democracy should move from Baghdad to Washington. It is in the US Capitol
that members of Congress, if they are serious about spreading democracy
abroad and strengthening it at home, need to begin advocating for the rapid
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
Americans need to recognize that, in addition to the lives and dollars this
occupation has cost the United States, it has also assaulted democratic
ideals handed down by the founders of America’s experiment with democracy.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and their kind did not warn casually
against the “entangling alliances” that go with empire building. Having
revolted themselves against an occupying force, they well recognized the
necessity that democracy be homegrown.
“We should have nothing to do with conquest,” warned Jefferson, who believed
the US must lead by example, not by force. The invasion and occupation of
other lands would, the founders feared, turn America into precisely the sort
of empire against which they had so recently rebelled.
When he served as Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams explained the
principle best: “(America) knows best that by enlisting under other banners
than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would
involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest
and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the
colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”
None of the twisted “spin” about spreading democracy that will be mouthed in
coming days by members of the Bush Administration, its allies in Congress
and its amen corner in the media will be sufficient to counter the truth
handed down by those who founded the American democracy.
Liberty is not spread at gunpoint, nor by the occupation of distant lands.
There will be no real democracy in Iraq until the occupation of that country
has ended.
THE NATION Iraq’s Lost Election
[from the February 7, 2005 issue]
In the run-up to the January 30 election in Iraq, the prospects for a fair
and credible outcome have steadily diminished. As Dexter Filkins of the New
York Times reported, rather than the normal democratic ritual of voters and
candidates, what Iraqis know is “a campaign in the shadows, where candidates
are often too terrified to say their names. Instead of holding rallies, they
meet voters in secret, if they meet them at all. Instead of canvassing for
votes, they fend off death threats.” Filkins further reported: “Of the 7,471
people who have filed to run, only a handful outside the relatively safe
Kurdish areas have publicly identified themselves. The locations for the
5,776 polling places have not been announced, lest they become targets for
attacks.”
As conditions deteriorated, it became harder for the Bush Administration to
spin the upcoming poll to choose an Iraq National Assembly as a major step
toward restoring security. Gen. George Casey, commander of coalition forces
in Iraq, predicted more violence on election day and “for some time”
thereafter, while a new US intelligence estimate foresees the elections
being followed by more violence and possible civil war.
The June 28 handover of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government headed
by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi failed to bring order to the country. The
Allawi government was unable to achieve legitimacy, to woo disgruntled
Sunnis into the political process or to recruit a reliable Iraqi security
force. The insurgency has grown to an estimated 200,000 fighters, with most
of Baghdad now hostile terrain. Offensives that military commanders claimed
would crush Baathist strongholds produced at best a fleeting success while
further damaging the US image. Falluja was destroyed and most residents have
become long-term internal refugees.
Iraq’s largest mainstream Sunni Muslim party has already pulled out of the
elections, saying that the violence plaguing areas north and west of Baghdad
makes a free and fair vote impossible. The Kurds and the Shiites will make
up the majority of voters, skewing the results and leaving the Sunni Arabs
underrepresented in the new National Assembly, which will choose a temporary
government and draft a constitution. Sunnis will have little incentive to
turn against the insurgency and to join the political process. Even if the
victors in the election are unusually magnanimous in their treatment of the
Sunnis and far-sighted in their vision for the country, the occupation will
remain a rallying cry for insurgent forces and thus an obstacle to national
unity.
As long as the occupation continues, any Iraqi government or constitution
will be tainted and incapable of producing the compromises necessary for a
stable and unified Iraq. Therefore, for the sake of Iraq’s future and the
safety of our young men and women, the United States must begin an orderly
withdrawal, coordinated with stepped-up US and international economic
assistance. We recognize that further violence and internal fighting among
Iraqis may follow, but to believe that a continuing US military presence can
prevent this is naïve or disingenuous; it will, rather, contribute to the
instability. The best long-term outcome is for Iraqis to regain control of
their own country and sort out their own future.
An increasing number of Americans recognize the worsening situation. In a
recent Gallup poll, nearly half of those responding called for either US
troop reductions or complete withdrawal. The politicians are beginning to
hear them. Sixteen House Democrats recently signed a letter urging a total
pullout. “This is the only way to truly support our troops,” the group said.
Senator Edward Kennedy reportedly will soon call for withdrawal by the end
of the year. Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft warned that
the election has “great potential for deepening the conflict” and said it
was time to ask “whether we get out now.” Conservatives from the Cato
Institute to Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative have called for
withdrawal. The antiwar movement is regrouping.
In February the Administration will demand from Congress a stunning $100
billion supplemental appropriation to maintain US military forces in Iraq.
The growing number of Americans who see an Administration blindly leading
the nation toward more death and destruction should tell their
representatives, “No more money for war!” That would be the best example of
democracy we could offer the Iraqi people.