Politics Daily: Were Those Iraqi Elections Really Worth The Price? [View All]

[Hissyspit]

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/15/were-those-iraqi-elections-worth-the-price

Jill Lawrence
Columnist/ Politics Daily

Were Those Iraqi Elections Really Worth the Price?
POSTED: 03/15/10

My eyes didn't get all dewy when Iraqis held their parliamentary elections. Others were moved by inspirational scenes, thrilled that we had bestowed the gift of democracy on a nation that seems, at last, to be taking to it. I found myself trying to remember exactly where "democracy" was on the evolving list of rationales the Bush administration used to justify the war (#3? #4?), and entertaining a series of dark thoughts about the 4,400 lives and $711 billion it's taken us to get this far.

I admit it, I'm still angry. I know it's imperative that we look to the future, but the past is hard to forget. Especially when it keeps cropping up, with all its missteps and tragedies, in books and movies. The March 7 election itself was bracketed by the release of Karl Rove's memoir, in which he says the war probably would not have been waged had it been known that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction -- and "Green Zone," a film in which a U.S. soldier searches in vain for WMDs based on faulty, manipulated intelligence reports. Truth makes pretty good fiction, it turns out.

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Yet everything in Iraq is relative. Six in 10 people in the ABC survey said they could "obtain basic household goods," meaning 40 percent couldn't – terrible, but good compared to what ABC polling director Gary Langer called "the dark days of 2007." Only 38 percent said they had reliable electricity – but that was up from 12 percent in 2008. Only about four in 10 said they had access to medical care and clean water – far below 2005 levels.

There's no question more Iraqis now favor democracy – 64 percent in the poll last year, 21 points higher than in 2007. And 84 percent rated security in their own area positively, nearly double the level in August 2007. Still, more than half reported at least one violent incident "in their area" – sniper fire, car bomb, fighting – in the previous six months. And it goes on at levels that we would consider shocking in our country. On Iraqi Election Day this month, there were 136 attacks and at least 37 killed. "I've never met an Iraqi who hadn't had somebody in their immediate family killed, injured or kidnapped" since the 2003 invasion, says Rachel Schneller, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Another sobering trend confirmed by the poll: Iraq is becoming more segregated...

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The government is seen as so corrupt that in 2008, Iraq ranked 178 out of 180 nations in a public corruption report card issued by Transparency International...

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Among the many things I can't get past – the lives, the money, the distraction from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the regional instability we've fueled, the uncertainties of the future -- is the oxymoronic nature of what we've done. Democracy by its very definition should be organic, nurtured and fought for by people who want it -- not imposed by sometimes stunningly incompetent Americans.

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