The Failure of Iraq's Previous Democracy

The Big Lies continue to be parrotted faithfully by almost all the media -- that this administration wants to bring freedom & light to the benighted world, that the Iraqi insurgents are simply against democracy & elections, that these will be the first elections ever in Iraq, that the upcoming elections will be fair & result in an expression of the Iraqi people's will.

Finally, today, I came across an opinion peace in Newsday that actually looked at the facts & the history: UP AGAINST THE PAST
The last time Iraq tried a parliamentary system, it ended in failure, under circumstances not unlike today's

The author, David Waldner, begins by debunking the 1st Iraqi Elections ever myth:  

Much of the American public is unaware that from the early 1920s until the revolution of 1958, constitutions, parliaments, political parties, elections, a free press and an active civil society were prominent elements of Iraqi politics.

It all ended, of course, in collosal failure. And some of the same forces that led to the collapse of that system appear to be looming over Iraq today.

He goes on through the history, how the British tried to establish a pliant government with a parliamentary facade while still controlling the foreign policy & of course the oil wealth:

After putting down the violence at great cost, the British - who had been given a mandate under the League of Nations after World War I - were trapped between the obvious need to prepare Iraq for democracy and their own interest in maintaining influence there at costs acceptable to the British public. Their solution was to create formal institutions of democracy while ensuring that their hand-picked rulers of Iraq would not be constrained by popular will.

Their solution was a foreign born king (compensation to the Hashemite dynasty for the Brits allowing Ibn Saud to throw them out of Arabia), who presided over a monumentally corrupt government of exiles, tribal leaders and of course, British ministerial "advisors."  As the much-maligned French would say, plus ca change...

Waldner then takes a good look at the bizarre electoral process taking place that only the US media is gullible enough to see as democratic.  He also brings up the radical right-wing slash & burn economic changes implemented by Bremer & the CPA which destroyed Iraq's social-welfare system:

Despite exercising the right to vote, the Iraqi public will have little input into issues of great importance to them, for when it come to the status of the Iraqi economy key decisions have already been made.

With remarkably little fanfare, L. Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the occupation, skirted international law prohibiting occupying powers from making major social and economic transformation and signed into law measures that called for the privatization of state-owned enterprises, opened the Iraqi economy to foreign investment, imposed an essentially flat-tax system with rates capped at 15 percent, and suspended almost all tariffs, duties and taxes on international trade, leading to a massive inflow of consumer products that crippled local producers.

He then goes on to make the logical inference that these economic policies certainly added fuel to the the insurgency.

This is the first time I've seen any writer in the American media broach the topic of the economic devastation we've wrought, not only to Iraq's present but for years to come.  Waldner doesn't mince words on what we need to do:

Bremer's orders restructuring the Iraqi economy should be revoked; only sovereign and unconstrained Iraqi governments should decide Iraq's economic future.

The tragic parallels listed by Waldner should go out as talking points for all opponents of this disastrous war to serve as a corrective for the great clown posse aka the American media (see David Broder today) who actually buy the Big Lie of our new idealistic Mission Civilisatrice.

•  What's happening now...

  http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/

  by mattes on Sun Jan 23, 2005 at 05:27:02 PM PDT

•  And don't forget

  Naomi Klein's Baghdad: Year Zero, which wonderfully exposes the outrageous and disastrous economic policies foisted on Iraq in violation of international law.

  Thanks for pointing this article out.  Important stuff

  by sharman on Sun Jan 23, 2005 at 05:30:11 PM PDT

•  Odious debt.

  Iraqi debts should be unconditionally forgiven under the doctrine of odious debt. A fledgling Iraqi democracy should not be held responsible for the debts of the dictatorship it replaces.

  There's a lot of literature about this online, for instance, here.  My layman's understanding is that the doctrine hasn't had much international legal support in the past (not surprising given Sack's 1927 definition).  His criteria:

  When a despotic regime contracts a debt, not for the needs or in the interests of the state, but rather to strengthen itself, to suppress a popular insurrection, etc, this debt is odious for the people of the entire state. This debt does not bind the nation; it is a debt of the regime, a personal debt contracted by the ruler, and consequently it falls with the demise of the regime....Odious debts, contracted and utilised, for purposes which, to the lenders' knowledge, are contrary to the needs and the interests of the nation, are not binding on the nation - when it succeeds in overthrowing the government that contracted them - unless the debt is within the limits of real advantages that these debts might have afforded. The lenders have committed a hostile act against the people, they cannot expect a nation, which has freed itself of a despotic regime, to assume these odious debts, which are the personal debts of the ruler.

  Patricia Adams at CATO (yes, I know) advocates for arbitration of Iraqi national debt on a case-by-case basis to determine how much of it fits the definition of odious debt and should be forgiven.  She hypothesizes that the "due diligence" of that would assure international credit markets that their third-world loans aren't going to be forgiven willy-nilly.  But honestly, since the Western powers themselves have declared Saddam Hussein's regime to be counter to the will of its own people, so much so that it had to be overthrown by outside forces (according the the post-WMD justifications), I can't imagine a better example of the odious debt doctrine in action.  Not calling Iraq's debt odious runs counter to all of Bush's rhetoric about Hussein and his state.

  Bush and Bremer are hypocrites in every conceivable way.  But it does seem like international human rights groups, and the UN leadership in its better moments, would be pushing to see the odious debt doctrine enforced.  It seems to be screaming to be applied here.

  Does anyone know more about this?

  by tlaura on Sun Jan 23, 2005 at 06:43:52 PM PDT

  •  Awesome doctrine

    does that mean that the US can slink out of the debt for an illegal war imposed by an unelected despot?

    by Cache on Sun Jan 23, 2005 at 11:39:49 PM PDT

    •  Hey, there's something in that.

      It's true: Bush wasn't elected when he launched the War and our Chinese financiers must know that Operation Iraqi Freedom isn't in the best interest of "the US state".  The next Democratic administration should get CATO on that one, stat.

      by tlaura on Sun Jan 23, 2005 at 11:50:18 PM PDT