To follow up on a matter about which I have blogged recently on a couple of occasions, Sunday’s London Observer reports that a leading politician in the Sunni-oriented National Dialogue Front has called for a boycott of the upcoming March 7 Iraqi elections. The controversy stems from an effort to ban several hundred Sunni politicians from the poll — a move advertised as a “de-Baathification” measure, although it has been interpreted as a swipe at the minority Sunnis. The party “will boycott the election, but it will stay part of the political process. The call is open for other political parties to take the same stand as our front,” said spokesman Haidar al-Mullah.
The New York Times reports that controversy continues to rage in Iraq over the disqualification of several hundred candidates, some of whom are accused of ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, from upcoming parliamentary elections. The paper cites a poignant statement by an unnamed American official: “The emotional weight of this issue is too heavy for the nascent democratic institutions to manage.”
I’m afraid this illustrates the difficulty with George W. Bush’s “democracy agenda.” The well-established Western democracies developed gradually, so that these polities could develop the capacity to deal with matters that carry “emotional weight.” The United States did not achieve universal adult suffrage until the 20th century. That was also the case with Great Britain, where the beginning of the process of democratization can be traced back to a time when America was just being settled by Europeans. In both cases, democratic institutions put down deep roots over the course of centuries.
I don’t know whether it would not have been wiser simply to attempt to establish in Iraq a less oppressive government them before, without trying to democratize overnight, as it were. Better yet would have been to avoid going to war for the sake of such a thing — if that indeed was the motivation (as a matter of fact, nations generally go to war from a mixture of motives)….
A couple of weeks ago I posted on this item about an attempt to disenfranchise Sunni politicians in Iraq, in which the notorious Ahmed Chalabi appeared to have had a hand. The Wall Street Journal reports Thursday that an Iraqi court has overturned the ban, and the Sunni politicians will be permitted to run as candidates in March 7 parliamentary elections….
It appears that a move is afoot to disenfranchise members of the minority Sunni Muslim community in Iraq in the run-up to elections scheduled for March 7. A special commission, set up ostensibly for the sake of “de-Baathification,”appears determined to prevent several hundred Sunni politicians from standing as candidates. “U.S. officials, who were caught off guard by the decision, now fear that it could reignite sectarian violence and dash their hopes of political reconciliation in Iraq — the end goal of the U.S. military strategy known as the ’surge,’” the Washington Post reports.
And who is at the head of this commission? The Post reports that it is “led by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who supplied faulty intelligence to the United States in the run-up to the war…. He’s fallen out of favor, and most U.S. officials now call him an Iranian agent.” (!)
Andrew Sullivan is looking to pick a fight with Jonah Goldberg over Abu Ghraib. Goldberg, on National Review Online, signed off on a reader’s comment that “no conservative is defending Abu Grahib.”
Sullivan: “[Rush] Limbaugh called the techniques at Abu Ghraib a ‘brilliant maneuver.’ [James] Inhofe said he was more outraged at the outrage than the offenses…. On the same page in the same week that Jonah publishes this, Marc Thiessen is aggressively defending the exact techniques used at Abu Ghraib as things we should be proud of!… On the same Corner blog, one NRO contributor last week actually proposed grouping prisoners in one ethnic group and murdering them in one go with a missile, even though many were admittedly innocent…. The only thing wrong with Abu Ghraib for National Review is that it was photographed and we found out about it…. This was one of the darkest moments in American history. And National Review aided, abetted and endorsed every bit of it. And wants to bring it back.”
Stephen Walt, who with his colleague John Mearsheimer wrote this controversial book, has addressed a sensitive question in an article posted on the Foreign Policy website Monday. Walt asks: “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims?” He states that he has attempted to make his estimates conservative, but he finds that the United States has inflicted more casualties than it has suffered, by a factor of about 30. To make his point, he cites the remark of a British journalist: “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world … it should stop killing Muslims.”
I get his point, but I wish he had addressed criticism along the following lines, with which he is surely familiar, from a critic who suggests that internecine violence among Muslims is the bigger issue: “There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both [Iraq and Afghanistan] by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too…. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact?”
The Iraq war was a relatively easy conflict to follow. At stake was control of relatively densely populated urban areas such as Baghdad. By way of contrast, Afghanistan until now has been an afterthought. Many of us may have had the sense that the fighting consisted in the main of the Taliban fighters occasionally coming out from behind the rocks to fire at allied personnel.
Brian Stelter of the New York Times may give us part of the explanation for these perceptions — as he reports that media organizations are shifting resources from Iraq to Afghanistan.
A Baghdad correspondent has filed f0r the Washington Post a story on the revival of commercial thoroughfare Al-Rabie Street.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page this morning has given space to Dr. Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt. Highlights:
“We have promoted the common ground that exists between Islam, Christianity and Judaism….”
“As the head of the one of the foremost Islamic authorities in the world, let me restate: The murder of civilians is a crime against humanity and God punishable in this life and the next.”
“Israel’s occupation of Palestine must be brought to an end; its continuation is an affront to the fundamental tenets of justice and freedom that we all seek to uphold. In Iraq and Afghanistan, full sovereignty and independence must be restored to their people with the withdrawal of all foreign forces. President Barack Obama’s historic address to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4 was a landmark event that opened the door to a new relationship between Islam and the West, precisely because it acknowledged these imperatives. Yet much work needs to be done by both sides.”
“This week in Washington I am participating in the Common Word Initiative, a group of religious leaders hosted by Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. While the focus of this initiative has been to foster dialogue between Islam and Christianity, I will call for its expansion to include representatives of all the Abrahamic faiths….”
Your humble servant only checks his post office box once every few days, and so I am sure I have been beaten to the punch over what surely is the main event in the October Atlantic Monthly: Andrew Sullivan’s open letter to George W. Bush. Sullivan wants the ex-president to issue a statement of regret over the “enhanced interrogation” tactics of which he implicitly approved.
There’s not much I can add to the discussion of this. Suffice it to say that the response in the blogosphere ranges from this to this.
As a Russian refugee comedian in America would say: “What a country….”