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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (40859)	8/29/2002 10:34:22 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

How about one that allows white men over the age of 21 who own their own land to vote? Gotta start somewhere. A rough guess at what elections in Iraq would get you.... All the Kurds would vote for the Kurdish party, all the Sunnis for the Sunni party, all the Shiites for the Shiite party. Whoever wins would use their power to advance the interests of their own group and kick the stuffing out of everybody else. One thing that can be learned from observing the history of electoral politics in the developing world is that elections do not necessarily create democracy. In countries where ethnic and clan conflicts are well established, elections generally become little more than a way of institutionalizing those conflicts. I seriously doubt that the result would inspire much envy anywhere. Many regional states have good reason to oppose a US move on Iraq. First, and most obvious, they don't like the idea that the US has the right to remove any government they don't like, a precedent that could be used against other governments in the region. The Turks do not want to see a weak and fragmented Iraq that could permit the emergence of a de facto Kurdish state. The Saudis do not want to see the emergence of a Shiite dominated state that would probably emerge as an ally of Iran, a Shiite axis that would very likely have a strong fundamentalist element (this possibility should concern us as well) and would appeal to their own fractious Shiite population. Others have their own concerns. I think that fear of democracy is not as much an issue as some would have us believe (for one thing, I don't think many Middle East leaders believe that democracy is possible in Iraq). The status quo, the presence of a crippled dictator with an axe constantly hanging above him, is something they have learned to manage. I think they worry less about democracy than about the rise of a new and unpredictable dictator or the collapse of Iraq into fragments, either of which would present a new and unpredictable set of problems, and either of which is much more likely that the emergence of a democratic state in Iraq.