[Mb-civic] Die Now, Vote Later

Thu Nov 11 19:39:24 PST 2004

Alternet - November 10, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20459/

Die Now, Vote Later

By Naomi Klein

P. Diddy announced on the weekend that his "Vote or Die" campaign will
live on. The hip hop mogul's voter registration drive during the U.S.
presidential elections was, he said, merely "phase one, step one for us to
get people engaged."

Fantastic. I have a suggestion for phase two: P. Diddy, Ben Affleck,
Leonardo DiCaprio and the rest of the self-described "Coalition of the
Willing" should take their chartered jet and fly to Fallujah, where their
efforts are desperately needed. But first they are going to need to flip
the slogan from "Vote or Die!" to "Die, Then Vote!"

Because that is what is happening there. Escape routes have been sealed
off, homes are being demolished, and an emergency health clinic has been
razed - all in the name of preparing the city for January elections. In a
letter to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, U.S.-appointed
Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi explained that the all-out attack was
required "to safeguard lives, elections and democracy in Iraq."

With all the millions spent on "democracy-building" and "civil society" in
Iraq, it has come to this: If you can survive attack by the world's only
superpower, you get to cast a ballot. Fallujans are going to vote,
goddammit, even if they all have to die first.

And make no mistake: they are Fallujans under the gun. "The enemy has 
got
a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Fallujah," Marine Lt. Col. Gareth
Brandl told the BBC. Well, at least he admitted that some of the fighters
actually live in Fallujah, unlike Donald Rumsfeld, who would have us
believe that they are all from Syria and Jordan. And since U.S. army
vehicles are blaring recordings forbidding all men between the ages of 15
and 50 from leaving the city, it would suggest that there are at least a
few Iraqis among what CNN now obediently describes as the "anti-Iraqi
forces."

Elections in Iraq were never going to be peaceful, but they did not need
to be an all-out war on voters either. Mr. Allawi's Rocket the Vote
campaign is the direct result of a disastrous decision made exactly one
year ago. On Nov. 11, 2003, Paul Bremer, then chief U.S. envoy to Iraq,
flew to Washington to meet with President George W. Bush. The two men 
were
concerned that if they kept their promise to hold elections in Iraq within
the coming months, the country would fall into the hands of insufficiently
pro-American forces.

That would defeat the purpose of the invasion, and it would threaten
President Bush's re-election chances. At that meeting, a revised plan was
hatched: Elections would be delayed for more than a year and in the
meantime, Iraq's first "sovereign" government would be hand-picked by
Washington. The plan would allow Mr. Bush to claim progress on the
campaign trail, while keeping Iraq safely under U.S. control.

In the U.S., Mr. Bush's claim that "freedom is on the march" served its
purpose, but in Iraq, the plan led directly to the carnage we see today.
George Bush likes to paint the forces opposed to the U.S. presence in Iraq
as enemies of democracy. In fact, much of the uprising can be traced
directly to decisions made in Washington to stifle, repress, delay,
manipulate and otherwise thwart the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi
people.

Yes, democracy has genuine opponents in Iraq, but before George Bush
and Paul Bremer decided to break their central promise to hand over power
to an elected Iraqi government, these forces were isolated and contained.
That changed when Mr. Bremer returned to Baghdad and tried to convince
Iraqis that they weren't yet ready for democracy.

Mr. Bremer argued the country was too insecure to hold elections, and
besides, there were no voter rolls. Few were convinced. In January, 2003,
100,000 Iraqis peacefully took to the streets of Baghdad, with 30,000 more
in Basra. Their chant was "Yes, yes elections. No, no selections." At the
time, many argued that Iraq was safe enough to have elections and pointed
out that the lists from the Saddam-era oil-for-food program could serve as
voter rolls. But Mr. Bremer wouldn't budge and the UN - scandalously and
fatefully - backed him up.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Hussain al-Shahristani, chairman of
the standing committee of the Iraqi National Academy of Science (who 
was
imprisoned under Saddam Hussein for 10 years), accurately predicted what
would happen next. "Elections will be held in Iraq, sooner or later,"
wrote Mr. al-Shahristani. "The sooner they are held, and a truly
democratic Iraq is established, the fewer Iraqi and American lives will be
lost."

Ten months and thousands of lost Iraqi and American lives later,
elections are scheduled to take place with part of the country in grips of
yet another invasion and much of the rest of it under martial law. As for
the voter rolls, the Allawi government is planning to use the oil-for-food
lists, just as was suggested and dismissed a year ago.

So it turns out that all of the excuses were lies: if elections can be
held now, they most certainly could have been held a year ago, when the
country was vastly calmer. But that would have denied Washington the
change to install a puppet regime in Iraq, and possibly prevented George
Bush from winning a second term.

Is it any wonder that Iraqis are skeptical of the version of democracy
being delivered to them by U.S. troops, or that elections have come to be
seen not as tools of liberation but as weapons of war? First, Iraq's
promised elections were sacrificed in the interest of George Bush's
re-election hopes; next, the siege of Fallujah itself was crassly shackled
to these same interests. The fighter planes didn't even wait an hour after
George Bush finished his acceptance speech to begin the air attack on
Fallujah, with the city bombed at least six times through the next day and
night. With the U.S. elections safely over, Fallujah could be destroyed in
the name of its own the upcoming elections.

In another demonstration of their commitment to freedom, the first goal of
the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah was to ambush the city's main hospital. Why?
Apparently because it was the source of the "rumours" about high civilian
casualties the last time U.S. troops laid siege to Fallujah, sparking
outrage in Iraq and across the Arab world. "It's a centre of propaganda,"
an unnamed senior American officer told The NY Times. Without doctors 
to
count the dead, the outrage would be presumably be muted - except that, of
course, the attacks on hospitals have sparked their own outrage, further
jeopardizing the legitimacy of the upcoming elections.

According to The New York Times, the Fallujah General Hospital was 
easy to
capture, since the doctors and patients put up no resistance. There was,
however, one injury, "an Iraqi soldier who accidentally discharged his
Kalashnikov rifle, injuring his lower leg."

I think that means he shot himself in the foot. He's not the only one.

-

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