Bizarro Election

January 18, 2005

The election in Iraq is getting weirder and weirder.

First, does anyone but me think that the media’s emphasis on registering Iraqi voters in the United States and other Western countries is being wildly hyped? This is, after all, an election in Iraq, but the U.S. media is giving enormous ink to the polling places being set up in the United States, neglecting to mention that these voters have no idea who to vote for, since there is no campaigning, no election materials, and no easy way to find out who the candidates are. Second, the press here keeps calling them Iraqi “exiles,” but they are in fact “immigrants,” just like millions of other foreign-born U.S. citizens and residents. They are not going back. Why exactly they should vote in Iraq isn’t clear to me, but it is clear that they represent a large pool of mostly pro-American (and pro-Shiite) voters.

The Bush administration has been saying for weeks now that the election doesn’t matter, that it’s only a first step, downplaying the importance of the election—even as sober analysts point out that the election is likely to splinter the country and set it up for civil war.

The funniest thing of all is the report that the Iraqi puppet government is planning to ban all private vehicular traffic on election day. How are people supposed to get to the polls? Why don’t they just impose an all-day curfew and order people to stay in their homes? That would make the election safe.

Today I am passing on an excerpt of a piece sent to me by Patrick Lang, the former Middle East chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency and a leading critic of the Bush-neocon axis. He provides some historical context, which is sadly missing in nearly all mainstream media reporting on Iraq. They treat Iraq as if it didn’t exist before the first Gulf War, and here Lang neatly summarizes the pre-history of Iraq. I was particularly struck by his notion that the Baath Party tried to reinvent Iraq as a nation not organized along ethnic and religious lines. Here’s the excerpt:

The British Empire screwed the lid down on Mesopotamia, installed King Feisal, and hoped for the best.  The country exploded in a mostly Shia tribal revolt shortly thereafter. After several years of fighting the British felt secure enough in what they had done to grant Iraq a rather liberal Western style constitution under the Hashemite (read foreign) monarch.  This government ruled Iraq with a certain benevolence on a parliamentary basis until 1958.  The government functioned much as does that of the Jordanian branch of the Hashemite family.  They are restrained, civilized people, the Hashemites.  Those who claim that Iraq has never known democracy seldom mention this experience of responsible and representative government.  There was early evidence that such a government might not endure in Iraq.  The unsuccessful 1944 revolt of generals of the Iraqi Army who hated a continuing British presence and who favored the German side in World War Two was a bad omen.

In the end, however, the opportunity and temptation provided by such a government for conspiracy and plotting among ethno-religious communities on the basis of Arab Nationalism and religious hostility proved too great.  The monarchy was overthrown in 1958 with great cruelty and public disgrace.  There followed a rapid succession of nationalist, communist, Baathist and other governments who waged both peace and war against and with the non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities (Kurds, Yazidis, Turcomans, etc).  The lid “screwed down” by imperial Britain lasted remarkably well long after they had gone and it functioned largely on the basis of the British sponsored continuation of the millennium long domination of the area by the Sunni Arab community.  The Sunni Arabs remained the real rulers of the country until the American invasion of 2003 and the Shia Arabs remained in the position of a despised “underclass” while the largely Sunni Kurds observed the process and resisted it when they dared.   Oddly enough, the Baath Party served in Iraq as a political vehicle for the entry of Shia and Christian Iraqis into the “mainstream of Iraqi life.  The Baath was founded by Christian Arabs and was designed by them so as to identify people as Arabs, not by religion, but by language and culture.  This suited the purposes of the Iraqi Shia perfectly and many, many of them joined the Baath Party rising quite high in the government and armed forces.  Indeed, the lieutenant general commanding the Republican Guards Armored Corps in the invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War was a Shia.

The present American and British occupation of Iraq has the specific intention of re-organizing the country on the basis of “one man, one vote.”  The declaration of this intention pried “the lid” off the “can of worms,” of relations and understandings that had long kept the forces of chaos in check in Iraq.  In the Middle East people understand that they must vote for candidates from their own ethno-religious community. To do anything else is a revolutionary choice, something that only a radical would do, perhaps a Baathist.  To make that choice is to risk rejection by your own community.

In this context we can expect that the coming election will produce a Shia dominated government under the influence of the higher clergy and likely to be inclined toward Shia Iran in a massively Sunni part of the world.

"Freedom is on the march?" No, chaos and war are on the march.