THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Iraqis fight a lonely battle for democracy

Whatever your view of the war, you should embrace today's election

Michael Ignatieff
Sunday January 30, 2005
The Observer

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' from a nearby country, actual voting a gamble with death, and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates and exiles abroad.
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? 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?

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 Bush administration has managed the nearly impossible: to turn democracy into a disreputable slogan.

Liberals can't bring themselves to support freedom in Iraq lest they seem to collude with neo-conservative bombast. Anti-war ideologues can't support the Iraqis because that would require admitting that positive outcomes can result from bad policies. And then there are the ideological fools in the Arab world, and even a few in the West, who think the 'insurgents' are fighting a just war against US imperialism. This makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates - fascists.

What may also be silencing voices 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 European observer, 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 Bush 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 collapse.

Beneath the fire blanket of defeatism, everyone - for and against the war - is preparing exit strategies. Those who were against tell us that democracy cannot 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, as a way of explaining why insurgency has taken root. A more subtle kind of condescension claims that Iraq has been scarred by Ba'athism and 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 near-impossible circumstances.

Consider the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who demanded democratic elections in 2003. Since the beginning, Sistani has refused either to ratify US occupation or to legitimise Shia extremism. In the face of incessant provocation, he has marginalised men of violence. His aides have been assassinated, but no calls to massacre the Sunnis or the occupiers have been issued.

Or consider the Kurds, who put aside their infighting, produced a common slate for the elections and kept their peshmergas from seizing Kirkuk and thus saved the country from a civil war.

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 have been by the much-despised Iraqis, not their supposedly all-seeing imperial benefactors. Since we lack the grace to admit that Iraqis have shown more wisdom and courage than we have, we 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 Iraq, its historical reputation will depend on whether freedom takes root there. Already the revisionists are working over the facts: the best way to write the history in advance is to shift the blame 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.

Children's Book Tells Tale of Iraq Librarian

It's not every day that an illustrated children's book about war is published. But author Jeanette Winter has created a book about a librarian who saved 70 percent of an Iraqi town's books during the U.S. invasion. The book is called The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq. Michele Norris talks with Winter about her inspiration for the book - an article she read about the librarian in a newspaper.

Kara, didn't know you were into that

Yes, leave if the Iraq Assembly asks us to leave; stay if the Iraqi Assembly asks us to stay.

President Bush said the same thing. Of course, we know y'all think he's disingenuous.

Iraqi officials say no results or turnout figure expected soon
Sunday January 30, 2005
By MARIAM FAM
Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) Preliminary results from Iraq's historic election could come as early as Monday, Iraqi officials said Sunday. But final results and an accurate estimate of turnout could take up to 10 days.

Election workers began counting the ballots at polling centers Sunday night after polls had closed, and they were expected to continue throughout the night, officials said. Figures will then be transmitted to a central clearing house in Baghdad, and only then compiled and later released.

Confusion over turnout was widespread Sunday, after the Iraqi electoral commission first announced a whopping 72 percent voter turnout. But they then acknowledged the figure was based only on guesses, and officials quickly backtracked.

``These figures are only very rough, word-of-mouth estimates gathered informally from the field,'' the commission said in a statement late Sunday.

However, the commission said it did believe, based on that anecdotal information, that turnout had exceeded expectations around the country.

The commission had estimated before the vote that about 8 million people or about 57 percent of the country's 14 million eligible voters would cast ballots.

The issue of turnout especially among the country's Sunni Arab minority is highly sensitive. Insurgents and some hardline clerics had called on Sunnis to stay away from the polls, and low Sunni participation could be seen as a victory for the rebels.

The report of 72 percent turnout came from Adel al-Lami, an official with the Independent Elections Committee. He told reporters the figure at mid-day as reports of brisk voting started trickling in.

But when journalists questioned him further about the figure, he and other Iraqi officials quickly backed off.

The top U.N. adviser to the Iraqi election commission, Carlos Valenzuela, said the turnout estimate had been based on nothing more than anecdotal information, or ``impressionistic approximations.''

Commission spokesman Farid Ayar said the initial estimate was based on polling station estimates of voter flow and line lengths, not on actual voting numbers.

Coming up with numbers for the two Sunni provinces where turnout was thought low Anbar and Ninevah might require considerable time because some residents there probably voted outside their provinces, election officials said.

For instance, three voting centers in Baghdad were set up for people from Anbar who had been displaced by the November U.S. assault on the city of Fallujah.

Voters in the different provinces were not asked when they voted whether they were Sunnis or Shiites, so an estimate of Sunni turnout alone might be hard to reach, officials said.

The United Nations is unlikely to come up with its own turnout numbers or evaluate those of the commission, one U.N. official said.

Did it hurt very much when they removed your sense of humor?

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan
1. A Mixed Story I'm just appalled by the cheerle...
A Mixed Story

I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.

With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election." Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned. The measures were successful in cutting down on car bombings that could have done massive damage. But even these Draconian steps did not prevent widespread attacks, which is not actually good news. There is every reason to think that when the vehicle traffic starts up again, so will the guerrilla insurgency.

The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a "joke," and I stand by that.)

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear.

Iraq now faces many key issues that could tear the country apart, from the issues of Kirkuk and Mosul to that of religious law. James Zogby on Wolf Blitzer wisely warned the US public against another "Mission Accomplished" moment. Things may gradually get better, but this flawed "election" isn't a Mardi Gras for Americans and they'll regret it if that is the way they treat it.
Sun, Jan 30, 2005 10:02