Democracy in Iraq
By Miguel Guanipa (05/26/07)
Most pundits and intellectuals tend to offer very gloomy forecasts when asked to venture their opinions on the future of democracy in Iraq. Some sincerely regret while others carp with a condescending air of self-vindication that there is precious little that can be salvaged from a strategy that has heretofore been rated - by even the most impartial observer- as an unmitigated geopolitical, social, and international disaster.
Some of their assessments simply mirror a latent animosity towards the president’s policies in general and have little to do with a fair evaluation of the facts, and others are humble resignations to the fact that the Iraq impasse offers very little in the way of final answers other than the malleable incursions into unrealized scenarios dimly proffered by hindsight.
I believe there is another possible answer that can be drawn from a most unlikely of sources. I am referring to someone who would offer the least incentive for hope in the present struggle; the man who claimed responsibility for masterminding the September 11 attacks and who also compared the terrorists in Iraq to the heroes in George Washington’s army: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The strained similarities of colonial revolutionary fighters and their distant British chaperones with Iraq’s insurgents and the U.S. Armed Forces may only be applied in the most cursory of ways. Eventually the comparisons become factitiously contrived to serve only the rhetorical purposes of those who are intent on demonstrating that America’s involvement in Iraq was doomed to fail.
For starters, Iraqi insurgents are hardly modern day equals with persecuted religious émigrés from England; many of them are foreign immigrants themselves, lending a helping sword to their Iraqi sectarian partners; and American forces are not seeking to sustain an 18th century styled monarchial sovereignty, but assisting freedom starved Iraqis in replacing a tyrannous, theocratic model with a more open form of government.
Yet when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed made the comparison of the Iraqi insurgents to George Washington’s fighters during the American Revolutionary War, there was an interesting bit of insight embedded in this atrocious parallel that was lost in the shuffle.
In one respect, this comparison betrays the liberal’s vicarious partnership in the insurgents’ cause, which is why many of them have no qualms about decorating terrorists with the title of “Freedom Fighters”. Behind this adulatory offering is the notion that the latter are sacrificing their lives so that they can no longer be subjected to the militarily imposed imperialism of the United States.
A logical corollary of this comparison is that the insurgents are fighting for a fundamentally warped form of “freedom”. Primarily they view the Americans as an oppressive force because the image of the latter as “liberators” has been swallowed up by the larger and more foreboding image of “occupiers”- a perception for which the media should bear at least some of the responsibility.
Notwithstanding this is a hopeful sign of sorts, as it supports – in a round about way – the notion that even the insurgents themselves apprehend the very fundamental principle of freedom from oppression, which is the reason why, aided by their own convoluted ideology, they have chosen to enlist as future martyrs.
If that is the case, then liberals should at least concede that President Bush is not far off the mark when he repeatedly intimates that freedom is something for which every human heart instinctively yearns, regardless of ethnicity or religion; hence his reason for persevering in the fight to export our far from utopian enterprise in freedom known as Democracy.
Thankfully, insurgents are not the only ones who have begun to grapple with this alien concept of self-governance; there is also evidence in the sparsely reported signs of progress in Iraq that within its mosaic populace there looms a large, silent majority that longs for real freedom. This is not a longing to be released from the shackles of the American “occupiers” but rather from the clutches of violent terrorist sects which are presently engaged in a bloody struggle for power.
It is more fitting for these citizens to be compared to General Washington and his forces. Their plight against the sectarian violent minorities that seek to intimidate them into submission through heinous acts of terrorism is by far more analogous to that of the young colonies under England’s stranglehold beginning to grasp the idea of independence.
Unfortunately, like all treasured bequests from free societies, Democracy can seldom flourish without the shedding of blood, which is a reality that even the insurgents also appear to have recognized.
Democratic systems have historically been birthed and subsequently upheld and nurtured through the use of force and the shedding of blood. The survival of even robust democracies such as ours sometimes depends on the use of violence to sustain the fragile principles of governance on which they stand, primarily to protect them from those who seek to subvert their founding principles through defiance of the rule of law and violence itself; so it should come as no surprise that the foundations of Iraq’s democracy are being forged in the crucible of such turbulent upheaval.
Chaos and bloodshed will more often than not precede stability and social order in any budding democracy, and this and every other known free and stable democracy has had to water the seeds of freedom with the mixed blood of competing contingencies that simply adhered to fundamentally different meanings and applications of the term. This is the state of Iraq today. But it does not mean that it will always be so.
Miguel A. Guanipa
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/14/guantanamo.mohammed/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html
(Printer friendly version) Email: Miguel Guanipa
