Reply #20: Afghanistan Election Fraud and the High Price of Empire

[Octafish]

Our good friend John Nichols also saw the irony:

Afghanistan Election Fraud and the High Price of Empire

posted by John Nichols on 09/10/2009 @ 8:50pm

It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy.

Karzai, an alleged oil industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.

And the Afghan people have been quite aware of that fact.

SNIP...

So he has, out of instinct and by necessity, relied on fraud to "win" the elections that have kept the Afghan president and his minions in power.

That was not much of a problem during the Bush-Cheney years. The men who assumed control of the United States after losing the 2000 popular vote by more than 500,000 and then shutting down the recount of votes in the contested state of Florida were not going to gripe about the mangling of democratic processes in distant Afghanistan.

But the fantasy is getting harder to maintain now that Bush has retired and Cheney has repositioned himself as the planet's primary defender of torture.

So we get the "news" -- not from the satirical Onion but from the nation's newspaper of record -- that US officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring "victory" in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on referring to as an election.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/470629/afghanistan_election_fraud_and_the_high_price_of_empire

Some oil companies have all the luck.