After an Iraqi polling station was blown up and a police station attacked, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “The Iraqis will be — will be just fine.” While Bush plodded through painfully idealistic claptrap in his second inaugural address, a photo of a tiny screaming Iraqi girl splattered with the blood of her parents spread rapidly throughout Europe. But no matter — we have the wisdom of Bush to comfort us in this time of unabated violence: “Freedom is on the march.” As is often protocol in Bush-world, just saying something apparently makes it so.
Bringing democracy to the Middle East is an old Western fetish. From the Constantinople Conference in 1876 to yesterday’s Iraqi elections, democratization in the region has often been dubious and mostly shallow, done only to appease meddlesome foreign powers. True democracy in Iraq — not the preferred democracy-lite of puppet governance and economic colonization — scares the bejesus out of the Bush administration’s chickenhawk war cheerleaders.
The Iraqi election death toll was 44 and the initial results mixed, with celebratory voting in Shi’ite Basra and desolate polling stations in the Sunni triangle. To avoid being labeled a defeatist liberal, I proceed with the caveat that it is impossible to predict the long-term outcome of the Iraqi election and the country that will result. Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan, completely oblivious to the big picture, played the arbitrary success prediction game in the run-up to the election: “45 percent turnout for Kurds and Shia, 25 percent turnout for the Sunnis, under 200 murdered. Reasonable?”
Such pessimism regarding the elections was not unwarranted, given their rather shady circumstances. 7,471 candidates ran in 111 parties, and fear of assassinations kept candidates and their platforms tightly under wraps. Zarqawi warned that it would be bloody for “whoever takes part in the [election] game of America and Allawi.” The Ministry of Health in Baghdad doubled its hospital beds in morbid anticipation.
With Iraqi turnout estimated between 50 and 70 percent, the “liberal media” has already declared an electoral success. Preferring photo-ops to actual results, they are focusing primarily on jubilant Iraqis, their primordial yearnings for democracy now sated. The phrase “turning point” is being thrown around ad nauseum, but these may just be recordings of the last four or so times we reached a “turning point” in Iraq. While any semblance of stable national self-determination is enough to bring a tear to the eye of most warm-blooded Americans, the point of an election is not to celebrate, but to govern. With the deadliest day of occupation occurring just last week, this election will do nothing to quash the escalating violence and ensure a governable nation.
What will come next politically? Sectarian conflict? A Sistani-led stride towards pluralism? Despite the precariousness of the Iraqi situation, those not seized by paroxysms of joy over the elections will be accused of being blinded by anti-Bush sentiment and of bemoaning the arrival of democracy. Now that geopolitical jiggerypokery has led us to quagmire in Iraq, the global anti-war movement must get over its collective ego and hold Bush accountable for his rhetoric of freedom — the real kind, not the variety that involves enslavement to US corporate interests.
Of course, this is something in which the neoconservative outpost in the White House is completely uninterested. Like beetles eagerly rolling forth their dung balls, the Bush administration continues spouting its vague platitudes and manufactured successes. This sentimental balderdash soothes and appeases while reality tells a different story. With basic utilities well below pre-war levels, more than 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians, 1,428 dead and 10,000 wounded American soldiers, a city of 300,000 obliterated, and heinous acts of torture now enshrined as policy, the only success in Iraq would be a genuine follow-up on our promises of democracy, sovereignty and liberation — a fulfillment of our recently incurred moral responsibility to the Iraqi people followed by a swift withdrawal.
And as for my arbitrary criteria for success? We can only hope that the hastily cobbled-together geopolitical unit of Iraq will one day rise to the level of the 2000 Florida election debacle.