Here’s What I Don’t Understand

The Bush administration claims that what it wants more than anything else in the whole Christian world—the Christian world being the only world--is for the Iraqis to have a democratic society. The Bush administration wants that for the Iraqis even more than it wants Republicans in the US to get rich and stay rich and more than it wants to punish the poor and elderly for being poor and elderly. The Bush administration wants the Iraqis to enjoy an American-style democracy so much that it is willing to go on killing thousands of American soldiers to see that the Iraqis get it. So now the Iraqi people have voted exactly the way the Bush administration allowed Americans to vote in the last two elections. That is to say, the Iraqis have kept certain factions from voting, have committed voter fraud, have intimidated, threatened and used bogus ballots. And the trumped-up American-style Iraqi election results say the Iraqis want to be a theocracy and want to be ruled by Shiites. But that’s not the way the Bush administration thought the free and democratic election should go even though the Iraqi people had been advised by bombs and gunfire on how to vote. So now the Americans are sending thousands of “special advisers” to Iraq to show the Iraqis that the American military is the only military that is going to force anyone to do anything in Iraq now that they’ve had their free and democratic elections. See, I don’t understand that. The Americans don’t approve of the rulers the Iraqis elected because the Shiites will rule by coercion, murder and intimidation. So the Americans are increasing the number of “American advisers” in Iraq to coerce, murder and intimidate the people into understanding who should rule Iraq. A story in the NYT this morning by Dexter Filkins (“G.I.'s to Increase U.S. Supervision of Iraqi Police”) which was posted yesterday from Baghdad, reports that “The plan to increase the number of American advisers is a significant departure from the overall American strategy of giving the Iraqis the lead role in fighting the insurgency…Under the new plan, which would be put in force in and around Baghdad, all the Iraqi units would get American advisers, and the advisers' total number would be increased by several hundred, said the commander, who spoke to reporters in Baghdad only on condition of anonymity. ‘The commandos and the public order brigades sort of grew like Topsy, very quickly, without much control, and without much training, but with lots of influence from the Ministry of the Interior and the Sciri-Badr organization,’ the American commander said. ‘The exact roles and responsibilities of those units is not clear to us.’ Indeed, the commander painted a troubling picture of security in Baghdad, where some armed militias appear to act with the backing of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense.” Now I grant you, it is indeed troubling that armed militias have taken control of Iraq and are returning the country to the same theocratic rule by force and atrocities that Iraq had before the US decided to make it a 51st state. But what did the Bush administration expect? And what’s all the bullshit about free and democratic elections? And why is our murdering and intimidation better than theirs? See, that’s what I don’t understand.