Something that's come up rather frequently in discussions about Iraq, most recently in this thread, is the idea that the Iraqi people want us out. The corrollary of that idea is that the Iraqi government isn't responding to the views of its people. One member on that thread referred to "the so-called democratic Iraqi government". This sort of has me intrigued, because of the various criticisms of our Iraq policy that you see in the U.S. and Europe, I'm not aware of any direct allegations to the effect that the Iraqi elections were dishonest. So it should follow that if the people of Iraq wanted us to leave, they could force their government to order us to leave. So I guess the questions for debate are rather straightforward:

1. Have the Iraqi elections been legitimate?

2. If the Iraqi people want us out, are they able to effectively have their government tell us to leave? If not, why not?

Well, I think the Iraqi STATE is an utter and abject failure, and the government cannot even pass the basic tests of administrative governance. Its agencies are in direct collusion with forces that oppose it, it cannot maintain or even challenge for basic sovereignty, let alone maintaining order. However, thats not the question here I suppose.

In terms of the limited framework of the question asked, Democracies don't work that way. I mean most of the US doesn't want Bush Jr. as their leader, yet he still is. Yet the US is still a democracy, the people just have to wait until the next elections. The fact that a nation's public opinion might not conform at that exact moment to the will of its leaders does not alter its status as a 'Democracy'.

In that sense Iraq is still a democracy. If you want to question its democratic credentials, then one should look at the cabinet, whose members are assigned through horse-trading and bartering at the highest level, in a failed attempt to get representation without divisiveness, and have nothing to do with the will of the electorate.

However, that is a fairly small quibble as the nature of a 'Democray' goes.

Yet apparently most of them preferred him in 2004. My point is, most of the Iraqis voted for their current government in their last election, and must have known full well at the time that the government they were voting for was not about to order us out, which had to have been nearly the most contentious issue of the day in their politics. Does this mean their opinions have changed since the last election?

1. Have the Iraqi elections been legitimate?

Not really. They were held under an occupation in the middle of an insurgency. However, that isn't the major issue here.

2. If the Iraqi people want us out, are they able to effectively have their government tell us to leave? If not, why not?

No, it should be evident to any close observer that the Iraqi government is subject to overwhelming American pressure. It was even forced to turn down Jaafari in favor of Maliki as prime minister. One of the issues that has been off limits to discussion in the Iraqi Parliament is the presence of American troops. Public opinion polls have made it clear that the majority of Iraqis have favored American withdrawal for several years. It is even probable that a majority of the parliament has as well. This
Hayden Article in April discussed some of these issues.

The other factor is that leadership interests are hardly identical to those of the individual Iraqi (just like the US). At this juncture it is clear that the Maliki ?government? would not survive without American troops.

What effect did the "occupation" have on the legitimacy of the elections? Were candidates censored who advocated having us leave?


Pressure in what form? What leverage do we have over the Iraqi government other than threatening to pull out if it didn't do what we want? But if the government wanted us to pull out, then that wouldn't be much leverage at all.

And in any event, this overwhelming pressure we allegedly wield over Iraq didn't prevent Maliki from ordering us to remove the cordon from Sadr City, which was probably one of the most successful operations we've had in a while when it came to reducing violence.


You got a source saying that this was a result of U.S. pressure? According to Wikipedia (which typically does not have a pro-Bush administration viewpoint):




Tom Hayden, huh? I'm sorry, but I have a really hard time attaching credibility to anything he writes. Yes, he quotes some sources in his article, but no sources that back up his main contention, which is that Parliament has somehow been blocked from discussing this. For that contention, he only refers to unnamed sources. I have to make enough of a leap of faith as it is when mainstream media quote unnamed sources, but it's especially difficult with someone like him, who (for the benefit of our readers) was, among many other things, one of the chief organizers of the 1972 "Hanoi Jane" propaganda tour for North Vietnam. The article might as well have been written by Kim Jong Il.

What has me more suspicious is why these sources would have to be unnamed. What are Iraqi MP's afraid of that would induce them to call for withdrawal anonymously? It seems to me they'd be putting themselves in much greater danger to life and limb by publicly calling for U.S. troops to stay than by calling for them to leave.


Maybe so, but the "individual Iraqi" still voted for these guys in open elections, presumably knowing that they favored continued U.S. troop presence.

Yet clearly don't now. That is my whole point. The fact that he is in power despite a strong majority who want him out of power does not make the US any less a democracy. People get to make democratic decisions on leaders every few years depending on the country, not on every issue at every time.

I don't see the general unpopularity of the US presence among the Iraqi people as having any impact whatsoever on the 'legitimacy' of the democracy. Otyher things might affect such legitimacy, but not this one, it doesn't even make any sense.



Well, firstly neither you nor I have any idea what they 'knew' about the actions of the administration regarding the US several years later. Secondly, as in every democracy, the issue of the day is often not the issue of the day. How many people have been elected not because their polities resonated, but because they were simply better than the other option? Thirdly, frankly yes, their opinions have changed, polls show that the percentage of Iraqis that ant the US to leave has ben growing steadily as time goes on.

Several years? The last election was less than a year ago.


That can happen in isolated cases, but in district after district? I'm not denying that the opinions of the Iraqi people have changed since the last election, but the point is, it seems reasonably clear that at the time, most of them apparently didn't have much of an issue with it. So the question that's left in my mind, assuming that the polls do accurately reflect the current state of Iraqi opinion, is whether their opposition to us is an opposition in principle to our being there, or merely an opposition based on the way events have been turning out lately. It appears to be the latter case.

Why should it be of concern to us if Iraq (or any other nation) is democratic? While I realize that I will be scorned as an "isolationist" that is fine-I wear the term as a badge of honor. We are repeating the same mistakes under George W. Bush as we did under Woodrow Wilson. It is strikingly ironic to think of how
Wilson, like Bush last month, was repudiated in the 1918 midterm elections over his Great War For
Democracy.

How many young Americans have been butchered in wars over the past century and a half?

OswaldTheOsprey

1. Have the Iraqi elections been legitimate?

I have a problem with the combination of thread title "How democratic is Iraq" and the question since it implies that if the election was legitimate then Iraq is a democracy. It isn't. An election is the engine that makes a Democracy (big D) work but without established democratic institutions and a set of rules that all the participants agree on, its meaningless. What are they electing people to?. Democracy works here (mostly) due to the constitution, courts and established Federal and state legislatures. The president accepts that he will be up for re-election at a fixed time, the army accepts that it is under civilian command, everyone accepts the final authority of the Supreme court etc. etc. Until equivalent structures exist in Iraqi society and all parties recognize and accept them, they can have all the elections they want and it still won't be a Democracy.

2. If the Iraqi people want us out, are they able to effectively have their government tell us to leave? If not, why not

As others have said, its not the purpose of a Democratic government to reflect the mood of the electorate at any given moment. We elect representatives to act on our behalf then vote in the next election on wether we approved of their choices. Otherwise, we might as well just put Zogby in charge of day-to-day policymaking, or have a phone-in system ala American Idol.

And who are these Iraqi people that want us out?. Its the Shiite majority, right now we're the only thing stopping them taking over. The Sunnis want us to stay because they don't trust the Shia dominated army and police and the Kurds don't care, they just want their seperate Kurdistan in the north. If the Iraqi government were to act on the will of the majority on a daily basis, it would only reflect the Shiite population.

Your references to the "How to exit with honor" thread are somewhat disingenuous, aren't they? I searched that thread, and could find no instance at all of anyone using the word "democratic," and the single instance of "so-called" was unrelated.

So far as I could discern from reading the posts in that thread, I am the only one who had anything to say questioning the Iraqi government, and what I questioned was not whether it is democratic, but whether it is a government. It isn't, for the reasons that I gave there.

Given that the "government" or Iraq is not, in fact, a government, it's hardly surprising that the people of Iraq have found other ways to tell us to get out of their country than by petitioning their "duly elected" "representatives." Most particularly, by shooting at us.



I agree very much with the spirit of these remarks, which recognize that it takes more than a "legitimate" election to make a democracy. I define democracy as >the effective exercise of popular will in the determination of actions of the state<. I emphasize "effective" and "popular." Free elections facilitate democracy rather well and are the fairest and best means of implementing it, but they aren't entirely necessary, and may not be possible in some situations. For example, I would argue that the governments in Paris under the Commune and St. Petersburg under the Soviets were entirely democratic. Not seldom, the popular will is evident even if elections haven't been held, as when Fidel Castro took power in Cuba.

For related reasons, I can't agree that the existence of well-developed institutions of government are necessary for democracy. Such institutions >can< facilitate democracy; they can also impede it -- as they frequently do in the United States, for example. It is only necessary that whatever institutions >do< exist actually act in accordance with the popular will. It is true that in Iraq, the institutions of government are weak to nonexistent; but the key thing is, they are responsive not to the people in general, but to particular political parties and their paramilitary agents.

The most important role that free elections and strong instutions play is not in implementing democracy, but in ensuring its continuation. There can be little doubt Castro's rule of Cuba for many years expressed the will of the people of that island, notwithstanding the absence of free elections; but there may be some legitimate doubt whether a Communist government would be elected if free elections were held in Cuba today.

Actually, I would say that the Ba'athist regime in Iraq was far more expressive of Iraqi popular will, at least of a part of the population, than the current "government" in Iraq is of that of any part of Iraq's people.

These are not difficult ideas, but they fly in the face of the customary, high-school-civics notions of the sufficiency of purely formal democracy, notions that entirely facilitate popular aquiesence to the control of the state by narrow elites.

What it implies more is that if they weren't legitimate, then it's probably not a democracy. The question was meant mostly as a lead-in to the second question.


But if the electoral system functions properly, it should fairly represent the views of the voters at the time of election, especially on a matter that one would think was probably very much of concern to them.


Are you implying that our presence there is doing something to prevent the government from acting on the will of the Shiite majority?



I explained in my opening comments what led me to post this thread. I know it's only tangentially related to the other thread, because otherwise I would have simply continued there, instead of starting this thread. Regardless, why I chose to start this topic the way I did is not a subject for debate.


The government of Iraq, however hamstrung it is in governing the country in many other ways, has one power that it is undisputedly capable of wielding: the power to order us to leave. That would save the electorate the trouble of shooting at us and being shot at themselves, wouldn't it?

Besides, I hope you're not suggesting that the mere fact that somebody's firing guns in anger means that he has the support of his people in what he's doing.


This is all very fascinating political theory, but when the Iraqis voted for their government in these last two elections, are you seriously suggesting that in district after district, they voted for people whose views ran counter to their own on the subject of U.S. troop presence in Iraq?

Well, considering your facile equation of legitimate elections with democracy, it would seem that you could afford to learn some political theory; so my comments were hardly a digression. But as I understand, upwards of 70% of Iraqis want us to get the hell out of their country. Are you suggesting that the failure of their "duly elected" representives, notwithstanding in "district after district" (as if we were talking about Connecticutt) negates that?

I wasn't suggesting that there was any failure on their part to represent the views of their constituents. And what's with the quotation marks around "duly elected"? Are you denying that they were?

As for the comment about districts, I'm pretty sure they have such things in Iraq. Now do you have an answer to my question, or would you like to keep evading it some more?

So if someone gets voted in, at that point they can just do whatever?

Another thing to me is this Blackstone, people do debate you, they do all the time, but more often then not when reading debates you happen to choose to participate in, you are not very giving, you come to the debate with an already preconceived notion of what is correct and it seems more often then not you give little to no ground on it, I ask why debate then. It probably does not help that pretty soon the debates move into circular patterns of the same on both sides. I mean I have asked you questions before on items you have brought up in which you just simply did not reply to.

As for your stance on Iraq, you claim that so much of the trouble with our victory comes from our lack of resolve at home, and then you move on to blame this typically on democrats or something. So I will try to ask again as it seems prudent to me.

If you accept that most of America really did not fight the idea of oif at the start of it, would it not be somewhat logical outside of just the realm of my perception to say that such may have come from the idea that all the stuff this leadership used to sell the war turned out not to be true, and furthermore that it seems in all likelihood no actual plan existed past that, and such in turn is what turned the public at large against the war coupled with the horrific day to day reality Iraq has become and seems to be slowly going the whole time also anymore?

Also on that note, while asking for all the people in upset about the war for an alternative save pulling out, why are you not so hard on the people in command of such for leadership or are they safe from any form of speculation or such demands? Maybe its safe to assume you are one following the stay the course boat maybe?

How you got that from my statement I'll never know.

The rest of your post is completely off the topic of this thread. Getting back to the topic, do you have an answer to the question I asked at the bottom of #12? Is it plausible that the Iraqi people would have twice elected a government whose views on the hot-button subject of foreign troop presence ran counter to their own?

Yes, completely. Firstly, as has already been explained, the dislike of US troops on the ground is a growing movement, increasing day to day. You yourself admitted that people's opinions have changed.

Secondly, as has already been explained to you, single issues are often lost in elections, as people are forced to choose between the options presented to them. How is it that the US elects a Republican government EVER, when the majority of the US is pro-abortion? Would you say abortion is a 'hot button issue'? Of course it is. But people vote based on a rather large combination of large button issues. You have asserted that this issue is somehow pivotal and vote-deciding, but thats just an assertion backed up by nothing. I can think of a dozen more issues that may well have been more important to the voters at the time of the vote.

Thirdly, what is your point?

"Pivotal and vote-deciding" is not the same as "the most important". I said it "had to have been nearly the most contentious issue of the day". Do you disagree? I mean, the very fact that they were voting at all, despite a strong terrorist threat, had to mean that the issue couldn't have been far from their minds. All other issues they were voting on depended on their ability to have elections at all, which most if not all of them were doing for the two times in their lives. You don't think that just might have pushed that issue somewhere near the Top Five?

So if it's even one of a few hot-button issues, it's hardly plausible that they would have elected a government that went against them on it. You mention an analogy to Republicans, but I think it can be argued that when the Republicans were elected in 2004, their stance on every hot-button issue (save perhaps stem cells, if that could even be considered one) was very close to being in line with that of the majority. And that's taking into account the fact that our situation isn't anywhere near as high-stakes as that of the Iraqis.


I see no need to keep repeating myself. Try reading my last post to you again. It wasn't that long.

Yes.

As I clearly said in my last post, I can think of dozen factors which might have been as or more important in the minds of the electorate when they voted, and thats just off the top of my head. To name a few: tribal loyalty, religious loyalty, security and safety, economic recovery and rebuilding, and so on.

In fact, its not as if these issues MIGHT have been the primary motivators of the vote, they WERE. According to CNN the electorate split along religious lines between Shia and Sunni, clearly this was the primary factor that influenced their voting.

But in case that is not ENOUGH, here is the nail in the coffin. Of the main groups standing for candidacy, NONE of the most popular candidates was running on a platform of Immediate US troops withdrawal, not one. The the United Iraqi Alliance, the Iraqi List, the Iraqi National Accord Movement, and the Kurdistan Alliance List, all spoke of keeping the US in place at least until stability was achieved. Only the Iraqi The Communist party (which scored a pitifully small number of votes) proposed immediate US troops withdrawal.

So the 'hot button issue' you have asserted was in fact Not an issue at all, for several reasons. I'm not sure why you asserted this was such a pivotal issue in the election with no evidence at all to support that invention.




Only if you completely ignore the example I just gave of abortion...



Humour me. I DID read your last post to me, and saw no sign whatsoever of what the point you were trying to get at is.

A bizarre state of affairs, if the Iraqi public favored U.S. troop withdrawal. The choices therefore are: 1. The public was basically OK with our being there. 2. The politicians were all tone-deaf, nearly to a man. 3. The politicians were all part of a big Iraqi conspiracy to basically rig the debate.


You didn't show that it wasn't an issue of importance, only that the majority of the electorate, in all camps, seemed to be on one side of it. I can understand where you're coming from, though, and that was my fault. "Hot button", in retrospect, was a bad choice of words on my part, because it implied controversy. What I was trying to get across was that it wasn't something that the public was likely to be apathetic about. It was one of the most significant factors in their lives.


You mean the way you completely ignored my response to that example?

You are moving from assertion to assertion here. Each time one gets disproven on fact you have a new one.

No, none of these new assertions is necessarily the case. As I stated in explicit detail in my last post, they had other, larger issues in mind. The issue of wheither or not the US would withdraw when was simply not the critical issue you asserted it to be. I already dealt with this. That, FYI would be the first half of my post you chose not to respond to.



So you re-assert. Yet I listed a half dozen other equally or more critical issues, including one (religious and tribal divisions) which post election analysts consistently said WAS the deciding factor in where people voted. The fact is there is no reason to believe your unevidenced assertion that this issue was the critical vote deciding issue you made it out to be.

But I don't want to be unreasonable, so if you assert again this was the 'most significant factor of their lives', then perhaps next time you could favour us with evidence: quotes from pre-election speeches or rallies in Iraq, or perhaps pre-election analysis in the US, or perhaps some evidence at all that this was the critical, vote deciding issue you constantly assert it was.

The very fact that no party represented the issue demonstrates that they knew it was not a vote getter, simply put, people had more important issues on their minds.



Really. So you responded specifically to my abortion example? Really? Well then, clearly I am in error and am utterly wrong. All you need to do is show me exactly where you dealt with this example, and demonstrate how wrong I am. So please, cite the exact quote where you dealt with it.

Otherwise I will be forced to assume this is more rhetorical fiction. Like when I asked you to please explain your point in this entire thread, you used the same rhetorical device, then abandoned it when challenged for specifics.

I would have to say overall, that nothing past speculation will bring an answer to that question. I mean that’s the reality of it, I could say that they voted so we would be happy and leave, of course just pure speculation, and I am sure you will imply that your speculation of it is more correct. I would simply like to have something that actually shows why the Iraqis voted, giving what Iraq is like, past that again like so much we base our actions on in regards to something of rather sever consequences we just use speculation, or in regards to this admin, lies and manipulation.

Questions for Debate:



Yes. They had a turnout that exceeded anything we have had as a % of the population.


Yes they could and have not done so because the majority do not want us out realizing that the country would quickly fall into chaos if we just pulled out. Some of the “militia” would like us out since they feel they could then take over the country by force. They are correct. IMO the Shiites would take the country (and murder 10s of thousands of Sunni ( if we pulled out quickly.

No, I am. Please accept my apologies. I had a response typed out, but (and this isn't the first time this has happened to me) it somehow got lost from the post by the time it got posted. I'll have to keep a closer eye on these things.

Anyway, I'll address that point now. The effect that the Republican Party has on the legality of abortion in the U.S. is pretty much the same that the Democratic Party would have: next to zero. And even if the Republicans were successful at making some kind of change at the national level, all it would involve is weakening or eliminating Roe v Wade, which would only return the issue to the states, where, if your assessment of public opinion is correct, it would remain legal anyway, in most of them. And I doubt if most people in states where it was legal would really care all that much if it became illegal in other states. I could be wrong, but I don't think it would weigh very heavily on voters' minds. Certainly nothing to compare it with the issue of large numbers of foreign troops hanging around your country. How many people are blowing up themselves and their neighbors over abortion? Aside from a few high-profile shootings that you could count on one hand over the past decade or more, there's absolutely nothing to compare it to even the calmest period in post-Saddam Iraq.


The first time you misunderstood my point, that was my fault, as I acknowledged, because I used a poor choice of words. But when you continue to misread it after I explained what I was getting at, I'll be less inclined to take the blame for it. The fact that something's important to people doesn't mean that there'll be political speeches over it during an election season, if it's something that everyone, or a good solid majority, agrees upon. Oxygen, for example, is important to have. Life wouldn't be much fun without it. Don't expect that fact to come up in the '08 presidential debates, though, because it's not terribly controversial.


Yet there were people in Iraq literally dying to get rid of us. Besides, according to your own previous statements, the parties all did represent the issue, by being in favor of us staying. So it's not just a case of it being not important enough to attract notice. It did attract notice, and the parties all took a position that was either politically stupid (to whatever degree), or politically popular (to whatever degree). To use your abortion analogy, it would be the equivalent of both the Republicans and the Democrats coming out against abortion. (or substitute any other issue, like minimum wage or whatever)

2. If the Iraqi people want us out, are they able to effectively have their government tell us to leave? If not, why not?


Being a democracy and having elected George Bush - could we force our government to leave Iraq? How would we go about that at this point - with George Bush having two more years in office?

Now, let's look at a terrorized population occupied by a foreign military force and also being attacked in sectarian violence. How would such a population go about telling a government it elected to have this foreign occupying force leave? Might this already terrorized population fear reprisal by the foreign military force? This is a population that lived with 23 years of Saddam Hussein and his sons. Does this sound like a population that would ask it's government to force the most powerful military force on the planet to leave?

We just had an election which put in Congress a bunch of people who could force Bush to do just that. They probably won't, because despite how unpopular this war is, I think most Americans are at least vaguely aware that too rapid a pullout would also be undesirable. Besides, our Iraq policy has much less immediate relevance to us than it does to the Iraqis.


I just don't buy this for a second. There are already hotbeds of anti-American sentiment in various locations throughout Iraq, and they don't suffer reprisals for merely expressing their opinions, only for violently attacking our forces or their neighbors. Most Iraqis would have far more to fear in terms of violent reprisals by calling for our forces to stay than by calling for them to leave. Calling for us to leave is far and away the safest option for them, physically.

(edited a dumb spelling error)

And just how could they "force" Bush to remove the troops?



I didn't say there were reprisals, I'm saying that a terrorized population might fear reprisals for "forcing" the US military to leave - and I'm speaking of fearing reprisals from the US.

Same way they forced Nixon to remove the troops from Nam: by cutting off the funds. And short of that, they could pass a resolution calling for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Has the Iraqi parliament even done that much? Has such a resolution even been brought to the table there for debate?


Yes, I'm aware of what you're saying, and there's nothing to support it. If we haven't made reprisals against Iraqis for expressing their opinions, what would make them think we would? Although our guys, in some isolated instances, may have gotten out of control and acted abusive in certain high-stress situations, I think it's abundantly clear to any Iraqi that we are not Saddam's army, and are nothing like it. They're not stupid, they know who it is who wants to bring back the old ways, where people were punished horribly for expressing the wrong opinion, and it ain't us. It's the people we're fighting against who want to do that.

So whatever the answer is to my second debate question, it's just not plausible that it would involve fear of how we would react to such a move.

Just so we have some historical accuracy, Congress did not cut funds for Vietnam until after the troop withdrawal had begun. We were leaving... no need to fund it anymore. So, no... Congress did not force Nixon to remove troops by cutting off the funds.