The Sunday Voting in Iraq

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Nothing Has Changed

I know I will be considered a party pooper for today’s memo, but I just can’t get as excited as the New York Times and the rest of the U.S. news media about the turnout of voters in Sunday’s Iraqi elections. In the cold light of day, it doesn’t appear to me that anything has changed vis-à-vis the insurgency, which has as its predicate the idea that the elections were arranged to suit the Americans and it is the American occupation that the insurgency is directed against. John F. Burns of the Times, who beat the drums for war in his dispatches prior to the March 2003 invasion, set the tone for the newspaper’s coverage: “On Sunday, everything about the voting resonated with a passion for self-expression, individuals set on their own choices, prepared to walk long distances through streets choked with military checkpoints, and to stand for hours in line to cast their ballots.”

The scenario we are told to expect going forward is (1) the successful establishment of a new government that will (2) draft a new constitution, which will (3) lead to new elections at the end of the year, which will (4) permit the U.S. troops to come home, mission accomplished. It would be nice it that’s the way it plays out, but the insurgents were never interested in a scenario controlled by the U.S. government. It’s not that they don’t like democracy. It is that they see the not-so-hidden agenda of the U.S. being a permanent, imperial outpost in Baghdad, to control Middle Eastern oil, and to protect Israel from the Arabs come what may. It would be nice if Ariel Sharon could make a deal with Abu Mazen sometime soon, but those of us who have been holding our breath for half a century waiting for that to happen are not so sure anything will come of the current post-Arafat opportunity.

Here is a more sober analysis on what to expect from Patrick Cockburn in the London Independent:

One of the things we always tend to forget when we get “good news” from Iraq, as there appears to be with the voter turnout, is that as bad as Saddam Hussein may have been in his 30 years in power, the number of Iraqi men, women and children who died as a result of U.S. sanctions and war – to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that it didn’t have – is on the order of 1 million, or one out of every 20. This is why I always said in these memos after the invasion that I hoped the weapons inspectors would find WMD and the imminent threat they would pose to the region and the world, even though I was sure they would not and said so before the invasion. That alone would have undermined the anti-war arguments and given justification for the invasion and the dozen years of killing sanctions. The President and the supporters the war can celebrate the elections Sunday, but they in no way alter the facts on the ground.

I’ve rarely agreed with Ted Kennedy on any major issue, but he is positively correct when he says there will be no chance of improvement in Iraq until the United States is gone. The Internet is now bristling with reminders of Vietnam and how the national elections there in September 1967 offered so much promise of victory. For example:

What do I expect now? It will be another ten days before the Interim government announces the election results and some while before the prime minister and vice presidents are chosen. I expect it will look like a puppet government to the insurgents, as it is probably the case that it will make it clear it wishes the United States to remain on hand, to protect it from the insurgents. What else?