- Proving again that Martin Luther King Jr. had the right
idea, the peaceful demonstrations by thousands of Iraqi Shiites demanding
direct elections have been a far more effective challenge to the arrogance
of the U.S. occupation than the months of guerrilla violence undertaken
by a Sunni-led insurgency.
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- Led by clerics demanding real democracy, the protests
have strongly raised this question: What right does the United States have
to tell people that they cannot be allowed to rule themselves?
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- With the stated reasons for the U.S. invasion -- the
imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his
ties to Al Qaeda -- now a proven fraud, the Bush administration was left
with one defense: It was bringing democracy to this corner of the Mideast.
If we now fail to promptly return full sovereignty to the Iraqis, inconvenient
as that outcome may be, the invasion will stand exposed as nothing more
than old-fashioned imperial plunder of the region's oil riches -- and the
continued occupation could devolve into civil war.
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- The Shiites do not require divine revelation to see through
the U.S. plan to perpetuate its influence through an opaque process of
caucuses designed, implemented and run by Washington and its Iraqi appointees.
It is just colonial politics as usual. That's why the conservative Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the revered cleric of Iraq's Shiites (who make up
60% of the country), is requesting a transparent one-person, one-vote election.
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- The U.S., however, has not agreed. And a top Sistani
aide recently suggested that President Bush's opposition to a universal
ballot election stemmed from a fear that his own reelection efforts could
be hurt if the invasion he launched resulted in another Mideast country
where ayatollahs played a major political role. Or, perhaps worse from
the president's point of view, an independent government might be so bold
as to ask the U.S. to pull out its troops, hand back control of its oil
and dismiss billions in reconstruction contracts with corporations like
Halliburton.
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- The White House now says that a free election is impossible
because no census has been taken. Is it naive to ask why this hasn't been
done? After all, we've been in control of the country for nearly a year
now. Couldn't we have spent some of those billions in taxpayer dollars
dedicated to Iraq to employ a few thousand Iraqis to go door-to-door with
clipboards? We also are told that key Iraqis signed off on the caucus plan,
yet the Washington Post writes that "there is no precise equivalent
in Arabic for 'caucus' nor any history of caucuses in the Arab world, U.S.
officials say." Perhaps a format Iraqis might better understand could
have been generated by, say, Iraqis?
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- The fact is, history teaches us that when foreigners
forcibly intervene in another country's affairs it is a terribly messy
business that usually fails miserably. And in Iraq, which is an artificial
construct of previous colonial intervention, "nation-building"
is a flat-out nightmare.
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- Our most trusted local allies, the Kurds in the north,
are loudly seeking an autonomous state in a federation; the Sunni minority
has grown used to a vastly disproportionate degree of power that it will
not easily relinquish; and the much poorer Shiites are clearly ready to
enjoy some fruits of majority rule.
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- Yet all this was ignored by Pentagon intellectuals, who
so cavalierly dismissed the warnings of the French and Germans -- not to
mention many millions of protesters at home and abroad -- while convincing
themselves that bringing peace and stability to Iraq would be a "cakewalk."
Now, the top U.S. general in Iraq tells us that the Iraqis "don't
want us to stay, but they don't want us to go," which is as good a
definition of quagmire as any.
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- There is, of course, no guarantee that a freely elected
Iraqi government would prove efficient or enlightened. But at least under
a representative government, decisions would be made by the people who
have to live with the consequences, rather than by self-interested foreigners.
After all, isn't that the radical idea upon which our own country was founded?
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- (c) 2003 Creators Syndicate
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- http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16307
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