The New Yorker and The Elections

It's funny, you surf the web looking for liberal comments on the Iraqi election and you find very little. Check out this item from the New Yorker. Hendrik Hertzberg celebrates the Iraq election in the harshest terms possible for the Bush administration.

[Dick] Cheney was wrong about the durability of the Soviet bloc and wrong about the villainy of Nelson Mandela, and it may yet turn out that the clipping-clippers are wrong about the possibility of something like democracy in Iraq. No one knows. There are plenty of Vietnam echoes in Americas Iraq adventure, especially in the corrosive effects on domestic comity, the use of false or distorted intelligence to create a sense of immediate threat, and the arrogance, combined with ignorance of local realities, of many senior strategists. But the differences are large, beginning with the nature of the enemy. The Vietnamese Communists possessed a legitimacy derived from thirty years of anticolonial struggleagainst France, then Japan, then France again, and, finally, willy-nilly, the United States. Iraqs insurgency has support in the Sunni minority, but it is no national liberation movement. And for all the cruelty of the Iraq wars collateral damage, it has produced no equivalents of Vietnams carpet bombings, free-fire zones, or strategic hamlets. (Nor, it must be said, did Vietnam produce an equivalent of Abu Ghraib; but then Vietnam was a war in which both sides held prisoners.)

Wow! He covered everything! In fairness to Hertzberg he does celebrate what may be the birth of legitimate democracy in the Middle East, but I do take exception to this statement,

Critics of the Bush Administration can take comfort in the fact that the apparent success of the Iraqi election can be celebrated without having to celebrate the supposed wisdom of the Administration. Like the Homeland Security Department and the 9/11 Commission, the Iraqi election was something Bush & Co. resisted and were finally maneuvered into accepting. It wasnt their idea; it was an Iraqi ideaspecifically, the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Shiisms most prominent cleric. In a way, it was a by-product of the same American ignorance and bungling that produced the unchallenged post-Saddam looting and the myriad mistakes of the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this timefor the first timethe bungling seems to have yielded something positive.

Iraq is still a very, very long way from democracy. And even if it gets there, the costs of the journeythe more than ten thousand (so far) American wounded and dead, the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children killed, the hundreds of billions of dollars diverted from other purposes, the lies, the distraction from and gratuitous extension of the war on terror, the moral and political catastrophe of systematic torture, the draining of good will toward and sympathy for Americawill not necessarily justify themselves. But, for the moment at least, one can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. It survived American slavery; it survived Stalinist coöptation (the German Democratic Republic, and so on); it survived Cold War horrors like Americas support of Spanish Falangism and Central American death squads. Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush.

Although there are many, many things to complain about in these two paragraphs, where do you get off claiming that the administration didn't want elections? Bringing democracy to a Middle Eastern state is just as important in the long term strategy in the war on terror as the removal of WMD. When was Bush against elections? Who demended that they go forward in spite of calls from the left (not least of which probably came from New Yorker readers) to postpone them? I will even let go of this though. The home of Seymore Hersch actually admits that elections in Iraq are a good thing.
- posted by Base10 @ 9:16 PM