(Most of) Iraq Votes

By Cernig

The majority of Iraq has voted in provincial elections today, with a very minimum of violence, as I had hoped. Which is great news but unsurprising given the massive security lockdown mounted for the event. Razorwire cordons, security checkpoints, closed airports and a total ban on vehicular traffic in cities - all just to have an election. Still, that it happened at all is encouraging, even if far from the shining victory the American right are hailing it as. I hate to rain on their victory parade but there are a couple of flies in their Mission Accomplished" ointment.

Not least, of course, that such elections might never have happened at all if the Bush administration had had its way. Despite the popularity nowadays of the conservative meme that Bush wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, head of the CPA, had wanted to simply keep US-appointed tame politicos in power. But Ayatollah Sistani demanded real elections with thinly veiled hints of a general Shiite insurrection to go with the Sunni-led insurgency if no elections were held, and a quick historical revision swifty ensued.

But there are still deep-seated problems in Iraq which these provincial election's won't touch, or will actually make worse. The Kurdish North didn't participate and neither did the disputed region of Kirkuk. Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga have already faced off there a few times and most analysts see Kurdish aspirations as the primary future source of violence. Then there's the resurgent Sunni minority, where the old and entirely undemocratic tribal power structure is set to be the election winner. And among Shiites, factional infighting which has fractured Maliki's own coalition heavily, looks to be another potential source of future violence. We may not know the full results for a month or more and there are going to be divisive allegations of intimidation, vote-rigging and double-crossing to navigate.

These elections are a good thing, but they're not a universal panacea. Still, the American Right wants to have its cake and eat it. They want to pretend that provincial elections mean "victory" while getting ready to blame only Obama if Iraqi social fractures ignored by Bush for so long lead to more violence later.

Comments

[Ron Beasley]

For all of their gloating the Bush Administration the neocons and wingnuts still lost - they didn't get the oil, they didn't get their permanent bases and Iraq is well on it's way to becoming a satellite of Iran.

[PrivatePigg]

"Still, that it happened at all is encouraging, even if far from the shining victory the American right are hailing it as. I hate to rain on their victory parade but there are a couple of flies in their Mission Accomplished" ointment."

These people were ruled by a brutal dictator for 30 years who used gases and unspeakable violence to keep the people in fear and in line. Now there is a democracy, violence is down, and people are voting. People are also exercising untold numbers of other freedoms (like some womens lib, for example) that the country has never seen. Of course, no one expects it to be perfect. Holding Iraq up to the US or some other established democracy so that you can say, "See, it's not that good, yet," is ridiculous. To be able to have anything but praise for the people of Iraq is absurd. It just shows that you, Obama and the rest of the Defeatocrats have invested too fully in the defeat of the US in Iraq. "Worst foreign policy decision ever!" Well, that meme won't hold up if Iraq turns into a stable democracy and ally, will it? And since we pretty much have every liberal - blogger or otherwise - on record lambasting the Iraq War, predicting failure, and investing in defeat, the only way you people can hope to not be horribly, horribly wrong and on the wrong side of history, is to try and compare Iraq to democracies that have been established for hundreds and hundreds of years, not 4 years like Iraq, and try to convince America that, no, voting, no violence, and freedoms really aren't that big a deal after Saddam, colonialism, etc.

[Steve Hynd]

Well Pvt Pigg, how do you explain the fractures in Sunni Anbar, the whole Kirkuk armed standoff and the Dawa/ISCI Axis obvious patronage from Iran?