Today's shrill critic of George W. Bush is King Abdullah of Jordan:
Posted by DeLong at September 28, 2004 10:59 AM | TrackBackIHT: Jordan’s king says Iraq elections impossible in current chaos: PARIS The Jordanian monarch said in an interview published Tuesday that elections in Iraq are impossible in the current chaos and that he sees no chances of improvement in the short term.
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King Abdullah II, who was paying a brief visit to France, told the daily Le Figaro that, in his view, it is the extremists who would gain the upper hand in the current conditions in Iraq.
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‘‘It seems impossible to organize indisputable elections in the chaos of Iraq today,’’ he was quoted as saying.
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‘‘The situation is very, very difficult and in the immediate I don’t see any chance of improvement.’’
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Abdullah said that extremists were currently the best organized faction in divided Iraq and if elections were held in the current disorder, ‘‘the results will reflect this advantage of the extremists.’’ Abdullah noted that Jordan supports Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi who wants the elections to take place as scheduled in January. However, the king was clear about his misgivings.
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Reestablishing security is the biggest challenge facing Allawi, Abdullah said, adding that Jordan’s position on this issue is clear: speed up the return of the former Iraqi army — not the generals but the middle-ranking chiefs and officers ‘‘who alone have the numbers and the capacity to reestablish order.’’
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‘‘The biggest mistake of the Americans was to dissolve the security forces and to purge the administrations of hundreds of thousands of members of the Baath party,’’ the main political force under Saddam Hussein, Abdullah said.
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Abdullah was meeting with President Jacques Chirac before heading to Italy....
http://www.juancole.com/
Time Magazine reports that the Bush administration had had a plan to use the Central Intelligence Agency to funnel money to candidates it favored in the forthcoming Iraqi elections. The rationale given was that Iran was bankrolling its own candidates.
This plan was apparently derailed in part by the intervention of Democratic Minority Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, who remonstrated with National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice about it.
I'd like to make three comments on this story. The first is to point out that this sort of behavior by the Bush administration fatally undermines the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. If Muslims think that "democracy" is a stalking horse for CIA control of their country, then they will flee the system and prefer independent-minded strongmen that denounce the US. The constitutional monarchies established in the Middle East by the British were similarly undermined in the popular imagination by the impression they gave of being mere British puppets. This was true of the Wafd Party in Egypt in the 1940s and early 1950s, which the Free Officers overthrew in 1952 in the name of national indepencence. It was also true in Iraq, where in 1958 popular mobs dragged the corpse of the pro-British Prime Minister Nuri al-Said through the streets and finished off the British-installed monarchy.
Posted by: lise at September 28, 2004 11:22 AMOn the one hand, it's not surprising that an absolute monarch doesn't like the idea of elections in a neighboring country. On the other hand, it's good to see an ally willing to state the truth that Bush denies.
Posted by: TreeTop at September 28, 2004 11:43 AMIs this a criticism or a plant, giving W(rong) grounds to delay the election?
Posted by: Tom at September 28, 2004 12:32 PMHelena Cobban has some comment on this at justworldnews.org. And there is good ongoing Syrian analysis at http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/Joshua.M.Landis-1/syriablog/
The foreign press is carrying this story in a pretty big way, but I wonder if it is being given much coverage here. The American public and media have little knowledge or understanding of the middle east or of Arab nations or of Islam. This lack doesn't stop news organizations like NPR's Newshour putting someone like Ken (Cakewalk) Adelman on their show and letting him say things like "except for Iraq, every single one of [the 22 member states of the Arab League] has an illegitimate, unelected government,okay?"
I especially enjoyed the 'okay'. Sure, Ken. Okay. Whatever. We'll all join you in pretending someone 'voted' for Iyad Allawi.
I find myself slipping into these sloughs of snark when I'm thinking/writing about these people and their statements. But I shouldn't. Because Adelman was saying this stuff as part of his spin that the invasion of Iraq was done in good faith, in the belief that 'Arabs' can do democracy. The neocon litany has it that 'liberals' and 'leftists' who are criticizing Iraq are just racists who think that democracy is only for white folk and it's the lofty, fully tolerant and broad-minded invader-avengers who are truly democratic. See David Brooks' latest piece in today's NYT.
When did supporting the ideal of democratic government begin to entail the derision of the genuinely humane?