A positive view of the Iraqi elections

Spencer Warren writes:

Permit me to explain why I largely disagree with your repeated dismissal of the value of the Iraqi elections.

As I wrote to you briefly about two weeks ago, it is a basic principle of counter-insurgency warfare (e.g. see the books by Sir Robert Thompson, based on his experiences in Malaya) to build up the legitimacy of the government in order to help “drain the swamp” in which the insurgents swim. Obviously insurgents are not a standing army that can simply be defeated in big battles. If the elections help to establish government legitimacy, as they seem to be doing, and if they result in sizable numbers of Sunnis entering into the political process in order to protect their interests, then the elections are quite positive developments. This is not to gainsay the very serious obstacles we still face, politically, economically and militarily, but I think you are wrong to dismiss and ridicule the elections so vociferously. If the neocons and Bush acolytes over-stress the value of the elections, that is another matter, but they are positive developments.

Further, as I wrote to you a few weeks earlier, I think you are way off base in your focus on the Cairo communiqué. It doesn’t quite say what you claim and, in any event, it is a compromise document designed to paper over internal political differences. And whatever it says, it is not an important document. What is important is dividing the insurgents, which is the aim of the document from the government’s standpoint. In addition, please remember that we don’t see in the press more than a fraction of what is really going on—what the Iraqi government really wants from us, for example. I know that from my experience in the State Dept. Do you really think the government in Baghdad wants our forces to be attacked, or wants our rapid withdrawal?

Mr. Warren says that the communiqué was only a compromise document, and of no importance. Yet this unimportant compromise was the very compromise that got the Sunnis to participate in the election, which was the main reason that the supporters of President Bush’s policy saw the elections as such a remarkable and great and fantastic and laudable achievement. So the compromise was important. And the way it got the Sunnis to participate in the election was by signing on to the Sunni view that attacks on Americans are legitimate resistance.

Furthermore, this compromise with the terrorists is not simply a one-time event. It is of a piece with the whole pattern that our “war on radical Islam via democratization” has consistently taken. In order to reach some kind of democratic consensus, we end up approving our worst enemies, first Hezbollah in Lebanon, and then Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and now the terror insurgents in Iraq. By these supposedly realistic compromises, we make a hash out of the very principles and goals we are supposedly fighting for, and in the long run it will not work anyway.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 19, 2005 02:33 PM | Send