Ferguson calls Iraq a democracy

Here is an e-mail I sent on September 17 to Niall Ferguson:

Niall Ferguson
Harvard University

Mr. Ferguson,

You wrote in your piece at the Daily Beast:

Maybe you think George Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a worse mistake, though it gave that country democracy, showed Arabs that dictators can be toppled, and turned an enemy into a potential ally.

I am surprised that you, with your skeptical mind, would endorse the obvious falsehood that Iraq is a democracy. Do you perhaps share the neoconservatives’ definition of democracy—that a country that has elections is a democracy? Do you regard a country from which at least a million Christians have had to flee in order to avoid violent death at the hands of Muslims as a democracy?

Freedom House, which the neoconservatives treat as their authority on these matters (or rather they used to treat it as their authority, but they’ve ignored it for the last eight years in the case of Iraq), has consistently designated Iraq as “Unfree.” It has never designated it as even “Partly Free.” Here is Freedom House’s detailed report on Iraq.

Sincerely,
Lawrence Auster
View from the Right

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 18, 2012 02:07 PM | Send