Iraqi election

This is a long one, so I'm placing it in the extended area. Click to read on.

A while back I playfully linked to Juan Cole's discussion about the Iraqi election without saying anything about it. In the meantime, others have commented:

A lot of people on the left are calling out with a new cry since the success of the Iraqi elections. "Bush didn't even want them." "It was all Sistani." Wait, someone in IRAQ spoke up and demanded freedom? That is bad? We want to mock it?

It's only fair to mock Bush. After all, Bush originally was against elections in Iraq, and now he's for them. Back in 2004, you would have called that a "flip-flop". In 2005, however, the proper term is apparently "moral clarity".

In spite of all the pre-war scare tactics of WMDs and drones and terrorist ties, the sudden concern for humanitarian issues in Iraq rings a bit hollow. It gets even worse when you look at the motivations of the big players. Bush originally wanted to skip elections and install his favorite puppet Ahmed Chalabi -- a quid pro quo for Chalabi providing bogus WMD intelligence that helped Bush sell the war to the public in the first place. (Remember Chalabi? That guy who might have double-crossed us to the Iranians?) Sistani wanted elections -- not because he respects the will of the people, but because he knows there's a Shiite majority within Iraq, and it was the fastest way for him to consolidate power.

The point is, everybody has an axe to grind. Unfortunately, with such little genuine concern over the democratic fate of the Iraqis, it makes it that much more unlikely that their democracy experiment will be a success. Yes, the elections were a wonderful first step, even if most of the candidates remained anonymous out of security concerns. But there also needs to be an accurate counting of the votes, and the results need to be widely accepted as valid, and the winners of the election need to be installed without an illegitimate power grab... we still have tons of work to do. Juan Cole adds,

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.

If Bush and friends don't get serious about the process, then we only need to look 10 years back in world history to see what will happen: religious civil war and genocide. (It's trendy.)