can't truss it
The Lab's Guide to the Mideast's newest craze, the demonstration election, courtesy of Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead's "Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in The Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador" :
Armed Minority: The origin of a civil upheaval which we oppose. Military juntas are invariably aremed and a minority, but they are never an Armed Minority.
Demonstration Election: A circus held in a client state to assure the population of a home country that their intrusion is well received. The results are guaranteed by an adequate supply of bullets provided in advance.
Fair Election: One in which, having stacked the deck conclusively in advance, we do not cheat in counting up our exact winnings.
Free Election: A post-pacification election, in which the "hearts and minds" of the survivors are shown to have been won over by the force of pure reason.
Free World: The group of countries that maintain a door open to private foreign investment.
Peaceful Change: Repression punctuated by free elections.
Security: Control by force or the threat of force; as in "political identification of the people with the Government...has not proceeded as fast as the security situation has..." (William Colby, head of the Phoenix Program.)
Stability: A political arrangement free of open warfare and satisfactory to our interests.
Terrorism: Killing people retail.
Turnout: The statistical proof of the public's devotion to the military junta and security forces in U.S.-sponsored elections; the index of successful coercion and intimidation in those sponsored by the enemy.
Herman and Brodhead don't say so in as many words, but the contours of the demonstration election vary out of expediency, from adventure to adventure, and era to era. However, the authors do say a demonstration election serves three distinct public relations purposes - first, to determine the machinery of political change in a country (U.S. opposition to popular movements is not based on hostility to goals...but rests entirely on our burning commitment to peaceful, democratic means of social change); second, to discredit other nations and potential targets for their democratic failings (AHHiranCHOO!); third, to placate the domestic population and domestic elite.
In addition, a demo election lacks the substance of democratic processes - in the case of Iraq, it's difficult to know where to begin, but here are two recent examples, here and here. (For a capsule review of the election and what to expect, check out this Rahul Mahajan post on his blog)
Brodhead and Herman list six qualifiers they say are necessary for determining the framework - that's the just the framework, just the "core requirements" - for a democratic election. Once again, the new Jello Biafra CD to anyone who can say that three of these qualifiers have been met in the last six months: freedom of speech, freedom of the media, freedom of organization of intermediate groups, the absence of highly developed and persuasive methods of state-sponsored terror, freedom of party organization and the ability to field candidates, absence of fear among the general population and absence of coercion thereof.
One theme that the teevee and newspapers have been flogging in the last couple of weeks is that the thousands of candidates "running" right now have been mostly unable to do so in any realistic way - indeed, I find it surprising we're only hearing about this now, but nevermind that. Put simply, it is impossible for a meaningful election to be run by an invading country with a vastly superior miltiary force under a state of siege (in addition to a kind of terrorism tailored for that portion of the populace most likely to join the so-called "insurgency") conducted by said military power. Arguing against the actions of the "insurgency" to stop the "elections" is to assume the false logic of a legitimate U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place, and even if they went off without a hitch, the Iraqi people aren't going to get democracy out of this circle jerk.
Of course, this is missing in any establishment media coverage of January 30. For all the noise generated by this farce, it would seem those timid mea culpas and were-we-wrong cover stories following the invasion apparently meant about as much as a vote cast in Baghdad tomorrow morning. Writes Herman and Brodhead:
It is taken as a patriotic premise that an election sponsored by the home government is democratic in intent and carried out in good faith. Hard questions about the election's real purpose, its possible manipulative function, or the feasibility of conducting a meaningful election under conditions of warfare, military occupation, and terror are rarely raised and never pressed. Similarly, the election is never condemned and ridiculed beforehand as a staged fraud and a deliberate attempt to mislead the public, even when this is patently obvious. This would be a grossly unpatriotic insistence on consistency, truth, and adherence to basic democratic values, and the mass media are not unpatriotic.
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