The Iraqi Elections

The problem is that BushCo always cite these elections as evidence of progress, but they are more or less irrelevant to our success.

In this campaign, success means a democratic and *autonomous* Iraq, free of US troops. The only way that we'll pull out is if the security situation is stable. That means that the only meaningful metric of progress toward our goal is the security situation.

They can have a hundred elections in Iraq, but we haven't made progress unless we've improved the security situation, and we clearly haven't. Suicide bombings are up, casualties are up, the number of autonomous battle-ready units has dropped. The percentage of Iraqis who want us out and who think it's okay to shoot US soldiers is rising. By the only metric that matters, we're farther from success than we were a year ago.

Iraq is doing this the old fashion way and hand-counting each ballot so we won't know for at least a couple of weeks. Bummer.

Martin Striz wrote:

In this campaign, success means a democratic and *autonomous* Iraq, free of US troops. The only way that we'll pull out is if the security situation is stable. That means that the only meaningful metric of progress toward our goal is the security situation.

I would disagree with this. The ultimate goal would be a democratic and autonomous Iraq - and more importantly a free Iraq, which is my biggest concern; if democracy leads to an Islamic dictatorship, we will have gained nothing at all - but I don't think the US military has to be gone from Iraq in order to achieve that. We still have tens of thousands of troops and permanent bases in Germany 60 years after WWII ended, but no one would suggest that Germany is not democratic and autonomous. The same, of course, is true of Japan.

Secondly, I think there is some connection between the progress toward a real democratic government and the security situation. With 70% of the people turning out for the vote, including the Sunnis, the people are beginning to be invested in this process and therefore less willing to settle for not having it. The Zarqawis in Iraq are entirely opposed to democratic rule, they want theocratic rule, so the success of democracy automatically isolates those elements and drains them of their power (not immediately, of course, but over the long haul).

Ed, I can see where you'd say that, and I can see how it could be. But the reality "on the ground" is somewhat different. The problem is with Iraq itself. It is completely artificial, encompassing a variety of peoples who choose not to live in harmony with their neighbors. The problem with this election in specific is that there will not be any outright winners. While the Shia will have the dominant majority of seats in parliament, they are unlikely to hold the outright two thirds majority required to form a government. Oh, good, you might say--now they have to stop shooting and negotiate. As the old saying goes, Never gonna happen. If there was ever a formula for the breakup of Iraq and the civil war, this election was it.

The key here is if we pull out now, Iraq will break up and there will be civil wars and masacres. However, if we pull out in three years, Iraq will break up and there will be civil wars and massacres. The only difference will be the 3000+ additional American dead. It's time to read the handwriting on the koran. Bush miscalculated badly, Iran, working thru Sistani, won, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it but keep dying or give it up. Greater Iran is the long-term victor, Independent Kurdistan is the short term victor (until the Turkish army decides to come in and kill them all), and the Sunni will get nothing but dirt. A whole new group of "Palestinians" to fight forever.

Don't forget the thing that every Muslim in the mid east understands. The ultimate conflict will be the Wahabi Sunni versus the Persian Shia, Greater (Saudi) Arabia against Greater (Iranian)Persia. And we don't (nor should we) have a dog in that fight.

If you sit back and take a long term view, you discover that we have spent all this money, effort and all these young lives to help create an Anti American Iranian-Style theocracy, a fragmented and untenable Iraq and that ultimate no-no, a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. That Bush and Cheney are criminals is beyond question. The magnitude of their crimes will become clearer over the next 20 years...

mikey

Ed, Germany and Iraq are very different situations. Germany had a history of free and somewhat democratic rule, and Hitler's regime was an anomaly, not the rule. Germany was able to recover and didn't have a persistant threat from religious radicals to worry about. Iraq has no such history, at least not in the lifetimes of anybody alive there, and has a persistant threat from Islamic fundamentalism. Any "democracy" there will always be contrived, and, more specifically, influenced or outright controlled by American policy (just like the loya jirga in Afghanistan).

Germany has a small US military presence that doesn't influence its elections, and it functions well without US intervention. Iraq CANNOT function without US intervention. Success would at the very least be withdrawing US presence and intervention to German levels, but then my argument still stands: that can only happen if the security situation improves. Success must be measured by US troop levels and influence, which must approach zero. That isn't happening. If anything, we need more troops. You can have a hundred more elections, but it's still just an Iraqi puppet with an American hand up its ass.

You are right that continued elections may eventually make the citizens of Iraq more interested in establishing and maintaining their own autonomous democracy, which would lead to a withdrawal of our troops, but then the elections are only secondarily predictive of success -- to the extent that they influence the security situation.

Also, I'm not so idealistic. We are, after all, building 14 permanent military bases in Iraq. It's more like a protectorate that an autonomous democracy. Our influence there will remain far greater than in Germany.

I think the problem with democracy in Iraq is that it tends to end up in a zero-sum game. The Sunni Arabs want a strong central government, and I suspect many still hope for a return to power. The Shiites and the Kurds, having been long opressed by a strong central government, want as little central government as they can get away with (this also allows them to avoid dissension over how Islamic in character government should be). Democracy plus zero-sum game, yields a winner takes all philosophy.

Incidentally, Martin is wrong about what makes Germany different from Iraq. It is not a "history of free and somewhat democratic rule" - the German Empire was formed as an absolute monarchy (dominated by conservative, authoritarian & militaristic Prussia) with fairly superficial democratic trappings. It was replaced by a short-lived and dysfunctional democracy, the Weimar Republic, before this was abolished by the Nazis. The real difference is that Germany, although long politically divided, had a long common cultural history, dating back to the Kingdom of the Eastern Franks, through the Holy Roman Empire, to the German Empire. This common cultural history is lacking in Iraq - despite long common rule under the Ottoman Empire.

How valuable and sustainable is an Iraqi "democracy" that was imported by neocon force? If self-determination was an ideal of any intrinsic cultural value, why didn't the people of Iraq rise up and create their own democracy? Like the strikers in Poland? Like the rebels in 18th-century America?

There seem to be two arguments here on why Iraq can't be like Germany or Japan. One is the false argument that Germany had a history of democratic traditions to fall back on; the other is that those nations are homogenous, while Iraq is heterogenous. The first was already addressed by someone else above. Germany's democratic traditions were quite shallow, and most of their history was decidedly non-democratic. Japan, meanwhile, had no democratic traditions whatsoever. Both are now stable and free democratic republics.

The other argument is more difficult, but I think it's overclaimed. First, while there are multiple tribal entities in Iraq, there is overwhelmingly a single religion, Islam. Iraq is far more homogenous than many democratic nations in the world - ours in particular. Homogeneity may in fact make democratic governments more necessary.

I think a much stronger argument can be made that the primary roadblock to Iraq being a real democracy is found in Islam, but even there I think this argument is overclaimed. There have been democratic movements in Islamic nations before. One of the most prominent, in fact, was in Iran in the early 1950s and that movement was crushed by the US government (in what I consider to be probably the single biggest foreign policy mistake we've ever made). While I'm still not convinced that the decision to go into Iraq was a good one, I am at least glad that this time our intervention was to take a brutal tyrant out of power rather than to put one in, as it was in Iran in 1953.

We should also bear in mind that Christianity was every bit as hostile to notions of genuine political freedom and self-determination as much of Islam is today until just the last few hundred years. It took the enlightenment period to bring such ideas to the fore in the predominately Christian West and there was much blood shed in the battle to dislodge the Church from her seat of political power. Those ideas will reform Islam just as they reformed Christianity, and I believe we are now at the crossroads of that movement taking place. The more we can do to support fledgling democratic movements within Islamic nations, the better the world will certainly be in the long run.

Does all of this mean we made the right choice in Iraq? Of course not. There are many other grounds on which to argue that we did not and I have little interest in arguing about those. My point was simply that, regardless of that question we now have at least a fledgling democratic movement in Iraq and we should be rooting for it. We should be doing all we can to encourage it. I truly believe that had we done so in Iran 50 years ago, rather than crushing it as we did, the Middle East would be dramatically different today. We would have seen, I believe, the beginnings of an Islamic enlightenment begin as an internal movement in Iran and spread throughout the Middle East. So regardless of how one feels about the war, and regardless of what likelihood one places for success in the success of Iraqi democracy, we should be very happy to see hopeful signs like this election and we should be doing our part to support it rather than naysay it.

What Iraq needs is economic growth. Angry seems to fade when you have food on the table. I don't think we have the right to pull troops out of Iraq. We went there for our own security concerns and those turned out to be, at the very least, not nearly as pressing as advertised, and in the process it cost a lot of innocent Iraqi lives. So I think we have to stay there as long as they ask us to. Not a minute less or a minute more.

I think one reason why both Japan and Germany took so easily to democratic rule was that a history of absolute monarchism made them more amenable to accepting as legitimate, and insitutionalising, a strong central government that happened to be democratic.

I think Ed underplays the divisions in Iraq. Firstly, it is on the front line of the Sunni/Shiite split. We only have to go back to the wars of religion in Europe to see how destablising this can be. Secondly, Baath Iraq has long been Arab-nationalist. This means that the non-Arab Kurds have no reason to consider themselves Iraqis.