Basra, Iraq -- Just after the polls opened at 7 a.m. Thursday, Majid al-Sari sat on his living room couch dressed in a natty dark suit and red tie, looking out anxiously at the early sunlight.
"I feel tense," he said. "For myself and for Iraq."
Though a candidate from one of Iraq's smaller parties, Sari, 42, was only slightly nervous about his own electoral fate. He is first on his party's slate of candidates in Basra and expects to win a seat in Iraq's first full-term parliament.
But as a secular Shiite, his political career is fraught with risks. He says he faces threats from both Sunni insurgents and the shadowy Shiite militias that wield influence in Basra's police force. He travels freely, but only because he works at the Defense Ministry and has a retinue of 20 black-masked soldiers with guns and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.
Above all, Sari says, he worries about Iraq's future and the bullying by religious parties, especially in the southern Shiite heartland.
"I was shocked to see the way religion has increased in Iraq," said Sari, a blunt, square-jawed man who lived in Sweden for more than a decade before the fall of Saddam Hussein. "I expected that once Iraq got its freedom, the effects of religion would fade."
Later in the day, as Sari drove through his native city, checking on polling sites in a white Land Cruiser, police illegally preached to voters through loudspeakers on top of their patrol cars, urging them to vote 555, the number of the main Shiite alliance. Despite his brace of guards and his official role, Sari said, he could do nothing to stop them.
"Eighty percent of them belong to militias for the religious parties," Sari said of the police. The numbers are in their favor, he added: There are 3,500 Iraqi soldiers in Basra but 14,500 police officers. "If there were to be clashes, there is no contest," he said.
Already Iraq has essentially subdivided itself, in the absence of its strongmen. The theocrats in the south, encouraged by overt Iranian influence, have emerged as a new Taliban. Here's a helpful photo attesting to that:
Pretty sweet, eh? That's the smell of Freedomocracy™, my friend.
Then you have the Kurds in the north, who have already struck their own deals with Norwegian oil companies to do some drilling and extracting. The Kurds are exercising their longstanding desire for autonomy, which is a wonderful thing, except that Turkey and (again) Iran also have sizable Kurdish populations, and they won't put up with rebellious incitement from Kirkuk. And how does a federalized Baghdad keep such a potential secession from occurring? The Kurds are not only essential to having any hope of balancing out the lunatic Shiites in the government, but their independence would seriously destabilize the entire region even further. So we are going to find ourselves working at cross purposes with our stated principles of fulfilling the yearnings of freedom.
Has any mainstream media agency tackled such an analysis of these likely scenarios? Of course not. They're too busy schmoozing and sucking up to the administration for access. They still do not seem to get that they are being played, that the Bushies need them to be useful idiots to get their message out for them. It does not occur to the media weasels that if they stood up en masse and walked away from Scott "Fluffer" McClellan the next time he lies and evades the questions, they will have to regroup and reconsider their tactics of lying and hypocrisy. Don't even play Fluffer's game any more; just get up, walk out, and leave him at the mercy of that dipshit weirdo Les Kinsolving. Maybe they can get Jeff Gannon™ back in, whatever. Quit giving them the satisfaction. Fucking grow a pair already. Do your damned jobs with some pride, people.
And while the large turnout earned some well-deserved huzzahs all around, we need to keep in mind that Iraqis have their own motives for this:
In Samarra, a rebellious city of 200,000 in the Sunni heartland, Mayor Mahmoud Ahmed said many residents were voting "because they think it is another way of getting the Americans out of the city."
More than 93,000 votes were cast in Samarra on Thursday, compared with barely 2,000 in the parliamentary election in January. "We believe that control for security in Samarra should be transferred from American soldiers to Iraqi soldiers and police. People believe if they vote, they will have representatives in parliament who will push the government to do that and make the Americans leave," the mayor said.
U.S. commanders in the area agreed with the assessment. "What motivates them is they think voting is part of a process to get us out of Samarra," said Lt. Col. Mark Wald, head of the 69th Armored Regiment in the 3rd Infantry Division. "There is a feeling here of a 'legitimate resistance' that only fights us because we are here. It follows if they have a legitimate government that they feel represents them, they can pressure the Americans to leave," he said.
And in some respects, it may just be the same as it ever was:
Though the election generally went smoothly, some voters complained of fraud and voter intimidation.
In Fallujah, the former Sunni insurgent bastion that was attacked by U.S. forces last year, 11 of the city's 35 polling stations did not receive ballot boxes, and some sites ran out of ballots in the morning, said Mayor Dhari al-Arsan. He said some voters thought it was done on purpose, but he attributed the shortage of ballot boxes to the large turnout.
In Mukshifa, near Tikrit, voters and police officials said Sheikh Shalon al-Boyisa, a leader running for parliament against 45 other candidates, used force to coerce people to vote for him. "I was coming here to vote. Democracy, you know," Ayad Rashid al-Boyisa, a retired Iraqi army major, said. "Sheikh Shalon showed up at the polling station and said to everybody: 'You are going to vote for me, Sheikh Shalon.' "
When he refused, the sheikh's bodyguards held him while the sheikh and his brother beat him on the head with a piece of brick, al-Boyisa said, displaying a scarred, bandaged head under a red-and-white kaffiyeh scarf.
Iraqi police confirmed al-Boyisa's allegations, but the sheikh's brother, Ali, denied that he or the sheikh had intimidated voters.
"We don't tell people how to vote -- it's democracy," Ali al-Boyisa said as the sheikh's servants carried dishes of rice and lamb to feed voters, election workers and police officers guarding the polling site.
It's impossible to unring the bell, unshit the bed, unstep on our dicks, etc. But we need to get serious about having a national conversation about the moral and practical issues surrounding troop withdrawal. Bush has been successful in keeping the timetable to his own designs, so that he can proclaim "victory" (as he chooses to define it, of course) and make a big show of a small drawdown by midterms.
But the thing is this -- regardless of the outcome, these people need to be made accountable for what they've done and how they've done it. Only a fool still really believes the PNAC delusion of a shining example of democracy for the rest of the region to follow, while we magnanimously recoup our soon-to-be $400 billion investment. Everyone sees us with our pants down, and the Iranians are going to run herd on Iraq the second we turn our backs and trudge back home.
This was a monumental fuck-up, based on a pack of lies, and even if we can get out of there with some face intact, the feckless morons who got us into this clusterfuck in the first place must account for their errors in principle and judgment. If you lose $400 billion for your company by cockily refusing to listen to people who know more about what you're doing than you yourself do, you deserve to lose your fucking job, at the very least.
And really, how much democracy can you read into Iraq's modest efforts, when our own little experiment has pretty much devolved into the Chimperor wiping his ass with the Constitution by imperial fiat? People seem to be taken with the odd notion that, since they have nothing to hide, they'd probably let themselves be strip-searched at random in the supermarket, if "freedom" required it of them. What they (and that preening fool Tom Brokaw, who really just needs to take his faux-avuncular harrumphing back to East Dakota or wherever) need to understand is that surveillance warrants are not difficult to get, that the Bushies deliberately avoided even bothering with that simple process for a reason. What is that reason? Well, if we had an investigative media, we might have an idea. Offhand, I assume they did it for the same reason Karl Rove licks his balls -- because they can. They want to see just how much they can get away with, where the limits are. They showed this propensity right from the start, when Bush's very first executive order was to seal off presidential archives from, you know, the public. Then 9/11 came along and provided them with all the cover they could dream of.
Perhaps that is the "democracy" they wish to export to the benighted slums of Iraq, by theocrat death squad, if necessary. We shall see. In the meantime, the purple finger gimmick is nice, but I'll take my platitudes with a big block of salt, thanks very much.
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