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Tomgram: Hiro on the Palestinian Elections and Political Islam

"Crusade" was one of the words that slipped from George Bush's mouth soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Just a few days later, he spoke of "this crusade, this war on terrorism." When it came to the Middle East, however, democracy joined our President's crusade as an animating principle rather late in the game. Most observers forget that, after our invasion of Iraq, it was Ayatollah Ali Sistani who pushed a reluctant Paul Bremer, then our viceroy in Baghdad, toward actual elections. Bremer had repeatedly blocked democratic municipal elections, and then came up with a cockamamie scheme for a non-representative national council. Here's how Juan Cole described this strange, undemocratic process:

"First they were going to turn Iraq over to [neocon favorite Ahmed] Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group."

Only a denunciatory fatwa by Sistani and streets filling with Shiite protestors turned back this version of "democracy" (and Bush was, at the time, "extremely offended" by Sistani's demands for democratic elections). Later, after other explanations for invasion, war, and occupation had turned sour, the President and the rest of his crew began to claim that we had actually invaded Iraq to start a democratic reform movement in the region. He would then hail those "purple fingers" as proof of his triumphant policies.

Now, as Dilip Hiro, author of The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies, explains below, a wavelet of elections is indeed sweeping across the Middle East -- the latest being the Palestinian elections taking place at this moment -- and the Bush administration faces a classic case of be very, very careful what you wish for… it might come true. After all, these elections seem to be sweeping political Islam into the ascendancy.

In Iraq, for instance, electoral democracy has certainly struck amid anarchy, a brain drain of professionals connected to the blossoming of a full-scale kidnap-and-ransom trade, a collapsing oil industry, increasing guerrilla and terrorist attacks, and, among other horrors, low-level forms of ethnic cleansing. This Iraqi version of democracy is, however, taking a form completely unlike anything George Bush and his advisers ever imagined. Of the two candidates once favored by elements of the Bush administration, Ahmed Chalabi was wiped out as a political (if not a personal) force in the December election; while "secular" and technocratic candidate Iyad Allawi, the former head of an exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord, which planted car bombs in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad (with the help of the CIA), suffered a disastrous electoral defeat. His "list" lost 15 seats, leaving it with only 25 seats and essentially powerless in the new parliament. There is now evidently going to be a renewed parliamentary alliance between the Kurdish parties and the religious Shiite parties that, defying American wishes, will encourage a semi-independent Kurdistan in the North, a religious near-independent state allied with Iran in the south, and a failed state in the center of the country. In the meantime, reports Oliver Poole in the British Telegraph, the American military has begun to suspect (rightly or not) that supporters of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have won seats in local elections to provincial assemblies.

In Iran, of course, a radical fundamentalist, Mahmud Ahmedinejad, won election to the presidency based, in part, on populist promises to spread the country's oil wealth; and in the Palestinian elections into which the United States has just poured $2 million ("more than what any Palestinian party will have spent by election day") in support of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas looks poised to score impressive gains that should allow it for the first time to enter a government that the Bush administration has evidently already assured the Israelis it will not recognize or deal with. So much for the Bush crusade for democracy in the region. Dilip Hiro offers a calm, informed, and reasonable look at just what to make of all this. Tom


The Rise of Political Islam
The Palestinian Election and Democracy in the Middle East
By Dilip Hiro

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

posted by Annamarie at 8:19 PM