The Thug/Puppet learns his lines
©2004 UrbisMedia
Last week, in an egregious and obvious (well, not to those cipher Republican faithful) political attempt to buttress his campaign Bush invited Iyad Allawi, the Ahmed Chalabi substitute, to come a read some lines for the American media. Allawi is the latest Thug/Puppet for American interests in Iraq, having been given the level of powers that Saddam once arrogated to himself, including the death penalty and expulsion of unfavorable new media, the twisted logic being that you might have to act rather un-democratically when you’re trying to install a democracy.
So Allawi joined in Bush campaign drumbeat that this is all about planting democracy in Iraq, which in the neo-con cream world will then pollinate the rest of the Middle East. The people will run their government, the dream goes on, not religious fanatics like the those running the Republican Party. And it just might work. Keeping the electorate terrorized with the prospect of another attack on our shores, soccer moms turned “security moms” increasingly convinced by Republican suggestions that Al Qaeda wants Kerry to be elected, could well keep Bush in office.
The other incessant rhythm in the drumbeat is that Iraq is free and will become a democracy in January, or a partial democracy(?) according to flip-flop Rumsfeld. On the stump Bush is relentless in his portrayal of Iraq as liberated, ignoring questions of its being closer to anarchy, to being so unsafe that journalists are fearful of kidnapping and being beheaded, and that Mr. Allawi, a former Baathist, has no control over several cities, and is approved of by only 2 percent of the populous. To get him in office the Republicans might have to ship over their Florida chad and voter registration manipulators, and Antonin Scalia,for good measure. So why not bring him over for a little Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy routine about how things are going so well.
Who wants democracy in Iraq, anyway? Does this administration really want democracy in Iraq? Beyond how it plays to dim-witted American voters, it wouldn’t have much value for American interests. Look at the numbers and the likelihood is that a “free and fair” election would produce a Shiite domination, with the likelihood of sharia law. So the Islamic fundamentalists surely do not want anything approximating an American democracy, which, after all, is run by its own religious fundamentalists. Do we really want to deal with another Iran, or the prospect of what the French feared in Algeria? Better to get our known Thug/Puppet in there; that’s the way we can keep our military bases in there, make sure the oil flows in the right direction, and keep the “reconstruction” money flowing into the Halliburtons and Bechtels. A “democratic” Iraq might be no more welcome to the non-democratic regimes in the Middle-East than would the re-installation of Saddam.
So Thug/Puppet Allawi has been packed off back to Iraq, still muttering the lines he was fed, but knowing full well that he might not even make from the airport to his quarters in the Green Zone. It will be like waking up from a neo-con dream.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.26.2004)