X marks the black spot

Soon the Iraqis will have their elections. They will not be free and fair, and neither will the whole country take part.

They are being run by "our side", appointed by our viceroy, and they will be won by "our guy". They will not resolve the problems in Iraq.

Do I care whether Iraq becomes a democracy? Not really. I don't consider our model to be perfect, nor particularly suited for an Islamic country. It has worked to some extent for Turkey (although it has its problems, of course) but the power structure in Arab countries is very different from that in Turkey. Apart from anything else, Turkey had a functioning civl society before it was democratic. Civil society in Arab countries pretty much means tribal society.

It's not the voting that counts. The biggest con that our leaders play on us is the insistence that it is. But what matters is that our leaders are accountable to us. The actual mechanism of accountability doesn't matter. It goes without saying that voting for one faction or another every four years doesn't actually make anyone accountable for anything. Our leaders do what the hell they want if the other faction is complicit. Consequently, Tony Blair still has a job despite the heap of evidence that he lied to the public -- which in former years would have meant his resignation -- and in the States, an attorney general who laughs in the face of the law, endorsing torture and suggesting that international treaties and conventions are mere inconveniences is not challenged by the Democrats, let alone forced to withdraw. They've finally realised that having a majority in the legislature means almost ungovernable power. They can outlegislate the judiciary, because the judiciary must apply the law, not make it. The only encouragement we have had recently was the Law Lords' attack on Blair's repressive anti-terror laws. If more care had been taken in framing them, even that would not have happened. In America, the constitution no longer protects the rights of citizens, not even to appoint their leaders, as the disgrace of 2000 showed and the Patriot Act confirms, and has nothing to say about the human rights of noncitizens who the States puts in concentration camps and tortures (why are they not marching in the streets? Of course, we know that it is because they fear terror, as they have been conditioned to, but do they support what is done in the name of fearing terror?).

Naturally, no one in power cares whether Iraq actually does taste freedom. The semblance of it will do. Americans don't mind a rigged election -- after all, they rigged the last two of their own without compunction (in what other country would the chair of one of the candidates' campaign get to decide who votes!), and those were by no means the first that they've fixed. They want to pretend they've achieved something and get the dollars flowing from the oilfields to their friends' pockets. (It astonishes me when people say "why would we spend all this money on a war just to get our hands on the oil? It would be cheaper to buy it." Do they not see that America is not economically a monolith, with money out and money in equally shared among all? Do they not realise that the money out on guns, bombs and mayhem comes from the public purse, the taxes of people who have absolutely no stake in Iraq, and the money in goes to executives of oil firms and other stakeholders in the oil industry?)

And the killing will continue. The Americans will say "They hate democracy. They opposed elections", keeping up the fiction that elections are democracy, and this will be their justification for more repression and murder in Iraq and for failing to make any attempt to reconstruct the country or to create the conditions for Iraq to become a peaceable and prosperous nation.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:55 am