Reply #116: Comments

[Jack Rabbit]

From the BBC report in post 95:

In the Shia Muslim south and Kurdish north of the country, lines formed at polling stations and there were smiles and tears among voters.

But polling stations in many Sunni-dominated cities in the centre of Iraq were closed or deserted, as voters stayed away out of fear of attack or opposition to the poll.

One question we may ask is whether the percentage of those voting includes people living in Sunni areas where there is no voting. Does it include Falluja?

In November -- and, indeed, in 2000 -- the Bushies demonstrated that they are very adept at identifying blocks of voters who oppose them and finding ways of suppressing the vote. In Ohio, the Republican Secretary of State made sure that traditionally Republican precincts were adequately equipped and that traditionally Democratic precincts were not. In Republican precincts in Ohio, nobody had trouble voting; in Democratic precincts, people stood for hours in the rain to vote against Bush. It wasn't classical fascism, where such people are stripped of their citizenship; nor was it the kind of populist fascism that characterized the Jim Crow and those whom the power structure wished to suppress were simply terrorized by night riders. However, it is voter suppression and it is fascism.

The backdrop of war provided Bush and his fascist aides with a pretext to suppress voter turnout. He bombed Falluja in November. This, we in this country were told, was to eliminate insurgents. However, it was no secret that Falluja was going to be attacked after the November elections; the insurgents left and the people of Falluja remained. They, who have taken no active part in the fighting against the occupation but who support that resistance, were the ones punished.

It is true, as the Bushies charge, that elements of the resistance do not want any election and have terrorized potential voters into supporting a boycott of the polls. However, for the people of Falluja, there was no choice at all. They couldn't vote or even refuse to vote if they wanted to. If they could and did vote, they would have no doubt voted against candidates preferred by their colonial masters in Washington.

There were other problems with the election campaign. These were outlined by John Nichols in an article appearing yesterday in The Nation Online. Nichols points out that no party running in the election, including the Shiites allied with Ayatollah Sistani, put a demand for timetable US withdrawal from Iraq as part of the party program. Says Nichols: "This constraint upon the debate effectively denied the Iraqi people an honest choice." Whatever the outcome of the election, we know from independent polling, as Nichols asserts, that a majority of the Iraqi people want the occupation to end. No credible Iraqi government will request Bush keep his troops in Iraq.

This was a very strange election campaign. Candidates were afraid to campaign in public. The best ways for candidates to get their message out was over the airwaves, which the quisling Allawi was able to do on his behalf and the behalf of the other neoconservative puppets in the interim government, and through the mosques, as Ayatollah Sistani's allies were able to do.

One would have the idea that the Iraqi election is a choice between parties who have no interest in any real democracy: puppets to a colonial power on the one hand; Islamic republicans on the other.

Nichols draws the following conclusion:

That democracy has been denied in Iraq is beyond question. The charade of an election, played out against a backdrop of violence so unchecked that a substantial portion of the electorate-- particularly Sunni Muslims--avoided the polls for reasons of personal safety, featuring candidates who dared not speak their names and characterized by a debate so stilted that the electorate did not know who or what it is electing.