Empire Notes

Remember that we didn't give the Iraqis their democracy. Washington didn't want elections. Sistani forced them. Rahul Mahajan summarizes how they came about, and concludes:

Some on the left have seemed to take the elections as a defeat and to think that the phase ahead for the U.S. antiwar movement is going to be much more difficult than it was before. The opposite should be true. The situation right now is this: legally, de jure, the Iraqi government is sovereign and responsive to its people. Practically, de facto, the U.S. military is sovereign and is virtually unresponsive and unaccountable. It is precisely in this disjunction between the de jure and the de facto that some of our most fruitful activism in this country has come. Most importantly, unlike armed resistance, it’s something we do, that we want to do, and that we know how to do. The challenges are many, but they start with us overturning the dominant media framework, that classifies all anti-occupation forces as anti-democracy. That is not true. We want the Iraqis’ de jure sovereignty and democracy to become de facto as well.