[Mb-civic] Elections in 2005, Civil War in 2006? By Scott Ritter

[Michael Butler]

AlterNet
Elections in 2005, Civil War in 2006?
By Scott Ritter
Posted on January 3, 2006, Printed on January 3, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/ritter/30299/

Having been asked by AlterNet to start blogging, I have wrestled with how to
structure the material I will submit. I have been given a wide remit
covering not just Iraq and the Middle East, but national security and
foreign policy as well. Rather than fall back on familiar ground, and write
an essay about Iraq, I took a step back to evaluate where I thought the
United States was heading from a national security perspective in 2006. I
found myself coming back to Iraq as the central issue around which all
others either revolve, or evolve. I believe that this will remain the
primary theme for the United States in 2006, just as it was (with some
intervention from Mother Nature) in 2005.

With the advent of a New Year, the buzz term being bandied about throughout
America by politicians and media pundits regarding Iraq is "Democracy." The
year 2005 witnessed three "historic" elections in Iraq, the accumulated
result of which is ostensibly a new, democratic Iraq capable not only of
self-governance, but also self-defense, thereby reducing the burden imposed
on the US military in the aftermath of the March 2003 invasion which toppled
the distinctly non-democratic government of Saddam Hussein, and the
subsequent occupation which oversaw Iraq's dark slide into chaos and
anarchy.

The democratic process that transpired in 2005 was in and of itself a
by-product of this chaos and anarchy. The January 2005 election of an
interim governmental authority responsible for raising a national assembly
whose job it was to draft a new Iraqi Constitution was a slip-shod affair,
the timing of which was driven by American political imperative as opposed
to representing the will and desire of an Iraqi electorate. In fact, the
most telling outcome of that election was that while Iraq had a mass of
people who were brave enough to face down terrorist attacks to make their
way to the polling places to cast a vote, Iraq did not have an informed and
organized electorate capable of defining and declaring core values upon
which they selected candidates for national representative government.

What the January 2005 elections in Iraq showed more than anything is that an
election does not certify a democracy; only a democracy can certify an
election, and Iraq is, after 30 some-odd years of totalitarian rule,
certifiably not prepared to organize itself and function as a free and
democratic state run on principles of secular rule of law and human rights
agreed upon by the majority of the Iraqi people. By rushing the January
elections, the Bush administration initiated a process which was prone to
abuse, something no amount of covert electioneering on the part of the
Department of Defense and the CIA could prevent.

In post-Saddam Iraq there are three groups capable of organizing themselves
to the extent that they can effectively participate in national-based
elections. The first is the Ba'ath party of Saddam Hussein, outlawed in the
aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and driven underground. Thus
banned from overt participation, the Ba'athists have formed their own
distinctly non-democratic coalition of secular Saddam loyalists, Sunni
Islamists and tribalists who resist not only the US-led occupation of Iraq,
but also any form of Iraqi government imposed on Iraq by the occupation.

Scott Ritter served as a Chief UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991 until
his resignation in 1998. He is the author of, most recently, Iraq
Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine
the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (Nation Books, 2005).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/ritter/30299/