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.