Empire Notes

Last Thursday, the foremost scion of the Bush Dynasty returned to the scene of the crime for his second coronation. This man, who once said, “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator," which at the time was considered a joke, gave a 20-minute speech in which he used the word “freedom” 27 times, “liberty” 15 times, and “free” 7 times. He declared a historic mission of the United States to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” According to him, the right of every man and woman to democracy stems from the fact that they all “bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth,” a doctrine Hindus, Buddhists, and many others do not believe in.

On Sunday, the ever-convenient Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man who if he did not exist would have had to be invented, declared a “fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology.” To him, the candidates running for election were “demi-idols” and those who would vote for them “infidels.” He accused the Americans of engineering the elections to “make Shiites dominate the regime in Iraq,” which is true if unavoidable in a country with a considerable Shi’a majority, and of bringing in four million Shiites from Iran to “take part in the elections to achieve their aim of winning,” a gross exaggeration.

For months now, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the man who is actually responsible for the elections now being held in Iraq, has told his followers that voting is a “religious duty.” Although he was somewhat coy about it initially, he has made it clear that their duty is, in fact, specifically voting for the United Iraqi Alliance, the unified slate of the Shi’a Islamist parties. Although he is opposed to a theocratic state, there is no doubt that he has insisted on elections, and at times mobilized over 100,000 people in the streets, primarily in order to increase the power of the Shi’a, in particular of the Shi’ite clergy. In the process, he has effectively, if not officially, been supporting the occupation.

According to the most recent issue of the Kurdish weekly Hawlati, the unified Kurdish slate, which will draw virtually all of the Kurdish vote, includes at least a dozen high-ranking Ba’ath Party members and people involved in Saddam’s Kurdish paramilitary groups created to aid his counterinsurgency in the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s. Kurdish leaders were taking advantage of the security situation to keep these names secret from Kurdish voters, who will be turning out en masse in part to reject Saddam’s dictatorship and his murderous Anfal campaign, that killed 182,000 people in Iraqi Kurdistan according to Kurdish sources. There may be many more such surprises in the other slates; the majority of candidates are having their names kept secret from those who are to vote for them.

Perhaps the most sensible position on the election has come from Moqtada al-Sadr, a man who inherited his authority from his father. Until recently, he had taken a low profile on the election, investigating the possibility of running some of his own candidates. Now, however, while stopping short of calling for a boycott, he says, "I personally will stay away [from the elections] until the occupiers stay away from them, and until our beloved Sunnis participate in them. Otherwise they will lack legitimacy and democracy."

All in all, a highly confusing picture. It’s incontrovertible that the United States has consistently delayed elections for two years, and would have done so longer had there been no opposition; it’s equally clear however, that the winner of these “democratic” elections will cooperate with the occupiers and lend, for most Americans if not for most Iraqis, an air of democratic legitimacy to the new Iraqi puppet government. But Iraqis can be forgiven if, after all of this, they understand as little of true democracy as Americans, who don’t seem to have understood that you impeach presidents who lie to get you into an illegal war, you don’t re-elect them.