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What I haven't really seen addressed is the results of an election.
Some of what I see posted in here seems to operate under the assumption that the barrier is getting the elections conducted.
For myself, and I believe others, this is not the primary issue. I realize that elections are going to occur at some time. But here is where I draw issue with the results:
The people who are currently fighting are coming from a number of places. Some of them are fighting to retain or regroup their political power. Hopefully people here are aware that those politically powerful are an ethnic minority in Iraq.
That is, they have reasonable fear about the type of government that might be established and officially sanctioned in regards to whether it would address their needs as a minority group--further complicated by the fact that they have been tyrannizing the majority for quite some time.
Now thats the legitimacy issue. But I want to make some more clear here:
For both practical purposes (doesn't make sense to ask an insurgent to vote) and safety (they might even blow the darn polling places up) we are going to leapfrog certain regions in the voting process.
To use a very crude analogy, we might consider what would happen if the blacks, or mexicans, or even native americans were currently embroiled in a violent insurgency during our election cycle. Now, it would seem to make sense to skip over some border states, or southern states, or reservations because they were filled with training camps and combatents.
However, obviously the election would effectively disenfranchise the very population that is fighting due to its disenfranchisement.
I suppose it's a fair question to ask me what I propose to resolve that conundrum. unfortunately it's a question i can't answer. My view is the very structure of what is going on makes our positin unteneble.
That is, we can not ask insurgents to come to the polls, we probably don't even want them to know where they would be. Yet we can not leave them out of the process. That's why they are fighting on one level.
This is one reason I see our efforts as eventually becoming a failure. Even if we start to see empirical evidence of what we consider process--say, some kind of voting occurring.
It masks the fact that the very process was flawed to begin with and couldn't even come up with a valid result. This is the classic methodological problem of selection bias. *sigh* hopefully that gives some more insight to some of our position and gives you all something to ponder tonight.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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