Nurturing Iraq's Non-Election

The U.S. news media are full of discussion and debate about this weekend's election in Iraq. Unfortunately, virtually all the commentary misses a simple point: There will be no "election" on Jan. 30 in Iraq, if that term is meant to suggest an even remotely democratic process.

Many Iraqis casting votes will be understandably grateful for the opportunity. But the conditions under which those votes will be cast – as well as the larger context – bear more similarity to a slowly unfolding hostage tragedy than an exercise in democracy. We refer not to the hostages taken by various armed factions in Iraq, but the way in which U.S. policymakers are holding the entire Iraqi population hostage to U.S. designs for domination of the region.

This is an election that U.S. policymakers were forced to accept and now hope can entrench their power, not displace it. They seek not an election that will lead to a U.S. withdrawal, but one that will bolster their ability to make a case for staying indefinitely.

This is crucial to keep in mind as the mainstream media begins to give us pictures of long lines at polling places to show how much Iraqis support this election and to repeat the Bush administration line about bringing freedom to a part of the world starved for democracy. Those media reports also will give some space to those critics who remain comfortably within the permissible ideological limits – that is, those who agree that the U.S. aim is freedom for Iraq and, therefore, are allowed to quibble with a few minor aspects of administration policy.

A painfully obvious fact, and therefore one that is unspeakable in the mainstream, is that a real election cannot take place under foreign occupation in which the electoral process is managed by the occupiers who have clear preferences in the outcome. That's why the U.S.-funded programs that "nurture" the voting process have to be implemented "discreetly," in the words of a Washington Post story, to avoid giving the Iraqis who are "well-versed in the region's widely held perception of U.S. hegemony" further reason to mistrust the assumed benevolent intentions of the United States.

Post reporters Karl Vick and Robin Wright quote an Iraqi-born instructor from one of these training programs: "If you walk into a coffee shop and say, 'Hi, I'm from an American organization and I'm here to help you,' that's not going to help. If you say you're here to encourage democracy, they say you're here to control the Middle East."

Perhaps those well-versed Iraqis say that because it is an accurate assessment of policy in the Bush administration, as well as every other contemporary U.S. administration. They dare to suggest that the U.S. goal is effective control over the region's oil resources.

But we in the United States are not supposed to think, let alone say, such things; that same Post story asserts that the groups offering political training in Iraq (the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, International Republican Institute, and International Foundation for Election Systems) are "at the ambitious heart of the American effort to make Iraq a model democracy in the Arab world."

To fulfill that alleged ambition, U.S. troop strength in Iraq will remain at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years, according to the Army's top operations officer. For the past two years, journalists have reported on U.S. intentions to establish anywhere from four to 14 "enduring" military bases in Iraq. Given that there about 890 U.S. military installations around the world to provide the capacity to project power in service of the U.S. political and economic agenda, it's not hard to imagine that planners might be interested in bases in the heart of the world's most important energy-producing region.