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Iraq: This Election is a Sham |
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by Salim Lone
(No verified email address) |
28 Jan 2005
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The ultimate irony is that despite its enormous cost in human life, physical destruction and deepening hatreds, this election will in no way make life easier for the Americans, the Allawi dictatorship or Iraqis. |
Very early in the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration recognized that a democratic Iraq, even a stridently anti-Saddam one, would not countenance the strategic U.S. goals the war was fought for: controlling the second-largest oil reserves in an energy-thirsty world, and establishing military bases required for undertaking the political transformation of the Middle East to serve American interests. A long-term occupation to secure these ambitious goals was no less tenable.
So even as the Americans proclaimed their mission as one designed to introduce democracy and human rights in Iraq, they fought against demands for early elections even from putative allies like the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They also maneuvered to put into place a self-governance and electoral plan that, through carefully circumscribed United Nations involvement, they thought would ensure that the hand-picked Iraqi leadership would enjoy some legitimacy, with the elections scheduled for Sunday providing an added boost of Shiite support.
But as this blood-stained election shows, the complete breakdown of this plan has been one of the most colossal U.S. policy failures of the last half-century. Indeed, this is not an election that any democratic nation, or indeed any independent international electoral organization, would recognize as legitimate.
For the only time in memory, electoral candidates are afraid to be seen in public and are forced to campaign from underground cells, with many afraid to even link their names to their faces in the media. There are no public rallies where voters might glean some information about candidates' positions. As one voter told CNN, he would prefer to vote for George Michael, since he knows more about the singer than about any of the candidates running for office.
Those sages interminably repeating that the success of the election will be determined by the level of the turnout do not understand Iraq, or for that matter, elections.
Most of us accept that the United States, as sole superpower, will enjoy a certain leeway in how it operates internationally. But the comprehensive discarding of the regime of checks and balances to preserve international peace and security when it comes to resisting destructive U.S. policies poses a threat to the world and to the United States itself.
The wonder is that the United States, fully aware that holding this election would unleash an altogether new level of violence, chose to push ahead with what was bound to further destabilize the country and intensify hatreds that will take decades to heal.
The ultimate irony is that despite its enormous cost in human life, physical destruction and deepening hatreds, this election will in no way make life easier for the Americans, the Allawi dictatorship or Iraqis. That was the view of most Iraqi, Arab and Muslim analysts at a fascinating closed-door international consultation organized in the fall by the middle-of-the-road Oxford University Center for Islamic Studies. They argued at a minimum for the election's postponement.
At a time when even many developed sovereign governments cannot be trusted to hold free and fair elections without deep outside scrutiny, elections under hostile occupations should be forbidden, since they have no other purpose than to further entrench the occupier's interests.
It was clear to those of us in Baghdad right after Saddam Hussein's fall that no long-term American project there, let alone the brutish attempt to cow Iraqis through massive use of force in civilian areas, would succeed. The limited self-governance plan was particularly a non-starter because of the transparent control the United States exercised over the process in order to ensure the emergence of malleable Iraqi leaders.
In any event, virtually no Iraqis, not even those benefiting from the American presence, see the superpower either as a friend or as a promoter of human rights and democracy. Each U.S.-dictated self-governance milestone has therefore backfired, just like the current election has, generating wider support and bloodier attacks by an insurgency that has grown more effective in thwarting American ambitions.
The first devastating attacks on the foreign presence in Iraq, for example, came soon after the United States selected in July 2003 the first Iraqi leadership body, the Iraqi Governing Council: The Jordanian mission and then, soon after, the UN's Baghdad headquarters were blown up, killing scores of innocents.
Despite its search for greater legitimacy for its preferred Iraqi leadership, the United States has studiously avoided the UN Security Council, since it knows most of its members abhor what is being done to Iraq (but have found it easier to keep their counsel and let this adventure self-destruct).
The United States has instead chosen to work with individual representatives of the world body who deal with Iraq. The first such involvement, when the late Sergio Vieira de Mello headed the UN mission in Iraq, was the most effective.
Vieira de Mello was able soon after the invasion to persuade L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, that he should appoint an Iraqi Governing Council rather than an advisory body. Even then, the anger over the composition of this council, and for UN support for it, was palpable in Iraq.
Nearly a year later, in another bid for UN support, George W. Bush repeatedly assured the world that the interim government would be picked by Lakhdar Brahimi, the special representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who spent weeks in Iraq consulting dozens of domestic groups about who they felt should lead the country. But on the day the interim government was to be appointed, a deal was struck by the Americans, behind Brahimi's back, to appoint the CIA-linked Iyad Allawi as prime minister.
Brahimi was not even consulted about this appointment. As a result, Annan's current special representative, Ashraf Qazi, has kept a low profile about the U.N. role in the elections, which essentially has been a technical one. But even this latest involvement, about which the organization had little choice, does not exactly undercut widespread Muslim perceptions of UN subservience to the world's sole superpower.
In the end, the problem in Iraq is not this "election" but a profoundly flawed U.S. policy that relies exclusively on the use of force. Despite its awesome power and the spending of billions of dollars to win over impoverished Iraqis, the United States has won little popular support in the country.
Even if it were possible under the Bush administration, a change in the American approach would accomplish little, so completely discredited is the superpower within Iraq (and in the Middle East and the Islamic world).
The only hope for peace in Iraq now is the United States agreeing to exit Iraq in exchange for an international force and mission under UN auspices, which would from the very outset indicate to Iraqis that its sole purpose was to help them become genuinely democratic.
Even then, peace after the bloodbaths will take years to achieve. Which is why a beginning must be made now for the United States to extricate itself from Iraq.
Salim Lone was an adviser to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy to post-invasion Iraq who was killed in 2003 in a bomb attack on the UN compound in Baghdad. This comment was distributed by Global Viewpoint for Tribune Media Services International.
© 2005 IHT
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