Quote:
Lastly there is the biggest contrast of all between the smug complacency of the administration over its electoral victory and the disastrous military failure of its adventure in Iraq. Since George Bush was re-elected over 200 more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Each new day brings another 70 attacks on the occupation forces as the territory dominated by the insurgents expands and the area which the occupiers can safely patrol shrinks. This week a senior Kurdish leader, although a supporter of the occupation, admitted that for a lot of its citizens, "the Iraqi government exists only on television".
The lawless background to the forthcoming elections has imposed whole new dimensions to the concept of a secret ballot. Most of the candidates will remain a secret lest they are assassinated. Polling stations are kept secret by the authorities lest they are blown up before election day in a week's time.
Iraq was the flagship project of the Bush administration and has turned into its greatest disaster. Yesterday's jollities cannot conceal the brutal truth that they neither know how to make the occupation succeed nor how to end it without leaving an even worse position behind. And, God help us, thanks to the unshakeable loyalty of our prime minister, we are left trapped in Basra shamed by the latest pictures of prisoner abuse and dependent for any shift of strategy on decisions taken in Washington by an administration that has repeatedly ignored British advice since its first monumental blunder of disbanding the Iraqi army.
A successful search for a new strategy can only start with a recognition that the present strategy has comprehensively failed. But the Bush administration II that took office yesterday is stuffed with people who are in denial about the dire situation of their forces occupying Iraq. In the couple of months since election day, George Bush has promoted the very people who thought conquering Iraq was a good idea and eased out anyone with a record of worrying about the consequences. Thus Condoleezza Rice, who was author of the alarmist claim that Saddam could produce a mushroom cloud, replaces Colin Powell, who warned the president that if he broke Iraq he would own the process of putting it back together again.
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source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...395462,00.html
secret candidates. secret polling places, whole regions of the country not able to vote, an entire segment of the iraqi population not represented (the sunni)...this will be a fine election, no doubt about it.
what this looks like, more than anything else, is a huge ritualized repetition of the "mission accomplished" photo op--something meaningles in fact but which makes the right feel like it has done something....
it is not about iraq, not about the iraqi people: it is about giving the bush administration material with which to "prove" that something is happening that is not fiasco.
that it will function to make the discourse of democracy american-style even more a joke than it already is is obviously secondary to these folks.
it really does appear that "liberty" as bush defines it means in fact little more than formality. that "the people" means only those people who are lackies of american policy objectives. so the "historic mission" of the states is then the propagation of a new kind of colonialism, one in which the principle langauge of domination is that of democracy bush-style.
way to go.
hearts and minds.
o yes.