Elections in Iraq: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

National elections were held today in Iraq to elect members of the Council of Representatives (Majlis an-Nuwwab). The news is filled with pictures of smiling Iraqis casting their ballots (using an "open-list" form of proportional representation), along with comments from U.S. officials about this "key milestone" in the development of post-war Iraq.

Elections are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a democratic society.

After all, while Saddam Hussein held the title of President of Iraq, elections for the National Assembly were held regularly. Of course, the government found various reasons to disqualify potential candidates, and so the winners tended to be members of the ruling Ba'ath Party. These elections were rightly recognized by most other nations as neither free nor fair.

For today's election, however, over 500 potential candidates were disqualified from being listed on the ballot, allegedly due to their past ties to the Ba'ath Party. Is this a legitimate barring of antidemocratic elements, or just a role reversal of who's on the ballot and who's off? One of the key figures behind this move is the infamous former political exile Ahmed Chalabi, the darling of the neocons who pushed the Clinton and Bush administrations to invade Iraq and overthrow the Hussein government. Chalabi, who is still wanted in neighboring Jordan for bank fraud, is one of today's candidates on the Iraqi National Alliance party list, so you could say he had a vested interest in keeping some of these other candidates off the ballot.

Time will tell whether today's election was relatively free and fair, or merely another in a long history of U.S.-sponsored "demonstration elections" meant to show progress and stability in a client state. It was many years before we learned how we manipulated the first elections in Italy after World War II by funding the Christian Democratic Party, paying voters to show up and vote our way (following the tried-and-true practice of "walking around money" in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia), and keeping left-of-center parties off the ballot. Our quick recognition of questionable election results has a long history, including South Vietnam in the 1960s and El Salvador in the 1980s. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now trying to convince the Organization of American States (OAS) to readmit Honduras because, after all, their new government is in place as a result of an election; the OAS, noting that the election in question was conducted by the leaders of an illegitimate military coup, is so far unconvinced.

So let the U.S. administration chalk up today's Iraqi election as another key milestone that allows us to withdraw our troops from that country, because, let's face it, no country can truly have anything remotely resembling a free and open society so long as it's occupied by foreign troops. However, even after our troops leave, the Iraqi people will be dealing with the aftermath of our invasion and occupation for years to come. Reports surfaced this week of sharply increased rates of birth defects - heart defects, missing or deformed limbs, head abnormalities - in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, possibly as a result of drinking water contamination from the U.S. military's use of depleted uranium (DU) and white phosphorus.

I wonder which achievement future generations of Iraqis will most remember us for - "spreading democracy", as former President Bush liked to say, or spreading birth defects.