Informed Comment

5 US Troops Killed, 18 Wounded

I take today’s New York Times/ AP report on Iraq as a very bad sign.

For one thing, it says

“On Monday, the military reported five new U.S. deaths: Two American soldiers from Task Force Baghdad were killed and three wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in northwestern Baghdad. One American soldier died and two were injured in a vehicle accident 30 miles northwest of the town of Kut in eastern Iraq, the military said. In addition, two U.S. Marines were killed in a weekend bombing south of the capital. The military also reported 13 Marines were wounded Monday in a mortar attack south of Baghdad.”

That is a large one-day toll. 16 injured from direct guerrilla attack, another two in a vehicle accident that may or may not have been produced by the war. And 5 deaths, though two of those were from the weekend, and one from a vehicle collision. It doesn’t look like things are miraculously settling down in the aftermath of Fallujah.

Indeed, November was the second-deadliest month for US troops since the invasion itself. That isn’t the kind of trend line you would like to see for a successful venture.

Then the rest of the article talks about how inadequate has been the performance of the Iraqi police and national guards, who face intimidation, threats, and even murder at the hands of the guerrillas.

Guerrillas used a car bomb to kill 7 or 8 national guards in Baghdadi, a small town west of the capital.

Worse and worse.

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The Fallujah Report and the Liberal/Conservative Divide

The “Fallujah Report” prepared by the Marines concerning their enemies in the most recent big campaign is now up on the Web in HTML rather than powerpoint, and so easier to download. One thing that leaped out at me was the small number of foreign fighters it reports. The guerrillas in the city were mostly Iraqi.

I was provoked to the following observations by a journalist’s question.

The big divide between liberals and conservatives in regard to Fallujah is that most liberals do not believe that force can be used to solve problems. They may believe that force is sometimes necessary. But they think it most often just causes new problems. They tend to see the world as complex, not in black and white terms, so that an unalloyed “bad guy” is rare (Bin Laden managed to make himself an exception). Liberals also see military force in the context of the whole society, so that they worry about what happens to children and grandmothers when it is deployed. It is liberals who remember that the Vietnam war killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants. And, they find US military deaths unacceptable.

So from a liberal point of view, Fallujah was terrible. It involved displacing hundreds of thousands of people, subjecting civilians to bombardment and crossfire, and resulted in over 2000 deaths, including over 50 US troops. The icon of Fallujah for the liberals was the little boy with the shard of grenade shrapnel lodged near his liver, or the old woman bewailing her dead relatives.

Conservatives do believe that force can be used to solve problems. They think in terms of good guys and bad guys, and it seems obvious to them that if you kill the bad guys, then you have solved the problem. Getting at the bad guys may be disruptive to civilian populations, and may cause some collateral damage, and may incur some troop casualties, and all that is bad, but it is necessary and worth it. You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.

Many bloggers are complaining from a liberal point of view about the downsides of the use of force. They are completely uninterested in the activities of the Baathist and radical Sunni guerrillas holed up in Fallujah. They are uninterested in whether these guerrillas terrorized the local population. All they can see is the vast destruction caused by the US assault, and the innocent lives damaged. From their point of view, the whole operation against the city is a form of collective punishment.

The US military powerpoint slides are classical conservatism. They identify the bad guys, who are the problem. They lay out their crimes. And they document the way the good guys went in to kill or capture them and so solve the problem.

The US military seems strangely unaware of the realities of insurgencies. It seems to think there are a limited number of “bad guys,” who can all be killed or captured. The possibility that virtually all able-bodied men in Fallujah supported the insurgency, and that many are weekend warriors, does not seem to occur to them. In fact, as Mao noted, guerrillas swim in a sea of supportive civilians. The US military slides suggest that now that the bad guys have been taken care of, the civilians can be won over. That this outcome is highly unlikely does not seem to occur to them.

The thing that strikes me about the military powerpoint slides is that they don’t make the argument to the general public. Because they just assume the conservative view of the use of military force, they concentrate on the crimes of the guerrillas but do not successfully defend the need to deal with them by assaulting the whole city.

Whatever the military rights or wrongs, the political judgment on the Fallujah campaign is easy. It was supposed to make holding elections possible in the Sunni Arab heartland. Instead, it has certainly further alienated the Sunni Arabs and made it more likely that they will boycott the elections en masse. If the Sunni Arabs remain angry and sullen in this way, Fallujah will have been a political failure.

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Kurdish Nationalism

Kurdish writer Sabah Salih has an interesting piece on the way the image of the Kurds has changed among European leftists from that of victim to that of collaborator with American imperialism. He suggests that European sympathy for Kurdish nationalism has correspondingly declined.

He says that I oppose the creation of a Kurdistan and advocate keeping the current 18 provinces, which is a position that obviously angers him deeply.

Actually, I don’t feel so strongly about the issue to deserve such a passionate response, and I’m not sure where I wrote something that Dr. Salih took to be so dogmatic.

It is true that I think multi-ethnic states with large numbers of provinces are more likely to remain stable than those with small numbers of provinces. A five-province state where each province is organized by a different ethnic group is open to being torn apart by subnationalist feeling. So for a stable Iraq, I suspect the 18 provinces are a better solution.

The old pre 1971 Pakistan is a case in point– East Bengal seceded to form Bangladesh. And India faced a separatist movement among the Sikhs of its east Punjab.

Plus, the creation of a Kurdistan province would involve a good deal of ethnic cleansing. The Turkmen and Chaldeans won’t live under it, and would flee. Substantial turmoil could wrack Kirkuk. Ethnic hatreds can rise suddenly and spin out of control, as we saw in Serbia and Bosnia.

All that said, it is not as if I have a big stake in the issue. If the Iraqi parliament can be elected, and if it creates a Kurdistan and perhaps some other large provinces for Sunni Arabs and Shiites, so that the country had 5 or 6, it would be fine with me. (This plan was put forward by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie). I suspect the Turkmen will demand an Iraqi Turkmenistan, as well, for their 700,000 or so members. And maybe, like post-1971 Pakistan, an Iraq with 5 or 6 ethnic provinces could hold together. But it could also collapse, as Lebanon did, or as Nigeria did in the late 1960s.

I was at a Kurdish panel in San Francisco at the Middle East Studies Association, and came away really frightened. The attitudes of extreme grievance and nationalist demands typical of the Salih piece were much in evidence in the statements of participants. One lady seemed to me to be looking for big revenge on the Arabs for Halabja. There was absolute rage in the room. Some of it was coming from non-Kurdish ethnic groups who share the Iraqi north with them.

Lakhdar Brahimi’s wise warning of last winter should be heeded. No one starts out to create a civil war; countries fall into them through inattention to key flashpoints. The Iraqi Kurds will not be well served by a large-scale outbreak of communal violence.

As for the subtext here, which is that many expatriate Iraqi Kurds want an independent country of Kurdistan, I think that attempting to create such a thing will provoke big bloodbaths and heavy intervention by Turkey and Iran.

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Fresh Wave of Violence in Iraq
5 US troops Killed

The relentless guerrilla war continued apace in Iraq on Sunday. AFP reported that guerrillas killed two Marines in clashes on Sunday. Also, in Anbar province, guerrillas killed three US servicemen on Sunday, and two had died there on Friday. A bomb exploded on the road to the airport. Al-Zaman says that the US campaign in Babil province faces difficulties. This is a broad area in which a million persons live, and had been a prime recruiting ground for Saddam’s Republican Guards. At least a hundred very wealthy families are supporting the guerrilla war there.

The interim Iraqi National Council added its voice on Sunday to the chorus demanding that elections be held on January 30. One of four deputy speakers, Jawad Maliki, a Shiite activist, said that the Temporary Administrative Law does not allow any space for postponing the elections, and it must govern the process. He also said that recent security developments were a reason for optimism. (-al-Hayat). The unrealistic hopes that the Shiite parties are placing in operations like Fallujah and Babil shines through in his words, which took me aback. I had listened to angry Sunni Iraqis calling into al-Jazeerah all afternoon to complain bitterly about “our brethren, the Shiites” and about the American military actions in the Sunni Arab areas.

For those who weren’t reading the site over the weekend, I laid out the reasons for which commentators like Charles Krauthammer are wrong, and the elections are heading for a potential train wreck if the Sunni Arabs boycott them. (Click on the link or just scroll down).

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Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books

Amid the unwarranted outbreak of optimism about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the wake of Yasser Arafat’s death, Henry Siegman’s essay in the New York Review of Books on Ariel Sharon’s true plans comes as a breath of fresh air.

Sharon is giving lip service to things like the road map and the eventual goal of a Palestinian state, but his real goal is to permanently forestall such a state. The end game for him is the division of the West Bank Palestinians into three Bantustans completely surrounded by Israeli forces or settlements, and the maintainance of Gaza as a permanent slum that advertises Palestinians as wretched and dangerous. Sharon is dedicated to annexing probably 45% of the West Bank, which would not leave enough territory for a viable Palestinian state, anyway.

The horrible implications for the state of Israel is its descent into a permanent Apartheid state. If the Palestinians don’t have a state, they will remain stateless. The rump “Palestinian Authority” will not be able to keep internal order any better in the future than it has recently. The Israeli army will inevitably keep being drawn into re-occupying Palestinians.

A temporary and de facto Apartheid state, such as the Likud Party is now running, is bad enough. But a permanent one will spell the end of Israel in the long term. No European country is going to want to continue to cooperate with it under those circumstances, nor most countries in the global south. Most Israelis themselves do not want to keep another people in the slave-like condition of statelessness, or to interact with them only through brutal military raids. And, an ever-growing Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank without any nationality of their own may eventually successfully claim Israeli identity (opinion polling shows about a third of them are already open to this possibility).

The Palestinian uprising has had a profound impact on Israel. Retention of immigrants is down to only 50%, a historic low. Over a million Israelis are below the poverty line. If Russia’s economy begins improving substantially, substantial back-migration of many of the Soviet immigrants (about half of them not actually Jews) could take place. Despite Ariel Sharon’s dreams of ingathering the French Jews, that seems a highly unlikely scenario.

So, when we hear that Sharon is willing to meet with the new Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, we have to ask, “for what purpose?” Most likely, it is to take his measure and see if he capable of policing the Bantustans for the Likud.

For a troubling discussion of the kind of self-examination being forced on Israelis by Sharon’s tactics, see The Guardian on Monday. It notes that the image of an Israeli checkpoint guard making a Palestinian play the violin has repulsed the Israeli public in a way that few other recent events have.

Omar Barghouti makes a shrewd suggestion as to why this image was so objectionable– it parallels the scene in the film, The Pianist, where German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them.

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Shock of the Week: Liberals in Liberal Arts

George Will’s column this week is unusually unreflective. I don’t often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is “only a theory” (a theory is a robust explanation well grounded in the evidence); and he knows that the Iraq war has been a disaster from beginning to end.

So it is surprising to see him parroting the ridiculous and pernicious line about major universities having few political conservatives in them.

There are all sorts of social-science problems with this allegation. First, what is the population that is being studied? Is it all tenure-track teachers in all universities in all schools and departments? Are we including two-year colleges? Four-year ones? Are we including Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools, Engineering schools?

If that were the pool, then academics probably mirror the general American society pretty closely. There are about 1.1 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools everywhere are. So it simply is not true that “universities” are bastions of the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe.

If what is being alleged is that the professors of History, English, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. at the top 25 universities in the US are disproportionately liberals, then that also raises questions. What is a “liberal?” If he means they vote Democrat, then so did, until recently, Zell Miller. And, what does it even mean to be a “liberal” in your study of Milton or of the French Revolution?

Then comes the question of “why”? If that is the question, it should be studied. The rightwing “think tanks” have not studied the question, and have only polemicized about these poorly constructed “studies.” (These are the same people who assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was 2-5 years from having a nuclear bomb.) In this instance, George Will jumps to conclusions about why.

I have been in a major history department for 20 years, and have served on innumerable search committees, in my own department and in other units on campus. I have never, ever, even once, heard any search committee member broach the political party affiliation of a candidate for a position, and there has never been any way to even know such a thing from the materials submitted. Hiring is done at the grass roots level in academic departments. The department appoints a search committee. The committee solicits manuscripts, reads widely, and decides on 10. Then it narrows those to 2-3 for a campus visit. Those finalists come and give a talk. If they seem less coherent or less able to engage with hard questions than their writing had suggested, then they are dropped. The question is always, “is this an interesting mind?” “Is this person’s methodology sound?” “Has this person mastered the relevant literature (i.e. has read the other articles and books on the subject)?” The manuscripts are read by the search committee, by the Department executive committee, by the faculty at large, by the School’s executive committee and deans, by the divisional committee (e.g. social sciences or humanities).

There would be no way to stack this process politically. The school executive committee is elected at large from all school departments; ours often has economists or biologists on it. The divisional committee often has political scientists. A substandard historian being hired only because he was a leftist would never get through this gauntlet. Each search committee is ad hoc, staffed according to field, and each differs in composition from the others. All the other committees are constantly rotating personnel, by election. There is no possibility of a centralized cabal that could appoint people of only one political coloration. In fact, David Horowitz wants to find a way to use state legislatures and congress to corrupt this grassroots and professional process by politicizing it and focusing on political outcome rather than academic achievement.

So if it were true that we don’t have many conservatives in the department, which I could not verify because it is a department of over 70 persons and I don’t know the politics of most of them, then how could that be explained?

That certain professions at certain points in time, skew politically, is demonstrable. For instance, back in the Eisenhower era, the US officer corps was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Now, only 10 percent of US officers identify themselves as Democrats (a really worrying development). Yet the salaries of the officer corps is probably disproportionately provided by the blue states. Why should this have happened to the officer corps? Should Congress legislate political balance in the upper ranks of the US armed forces?

In immigration studies, there are “push” and “pull” factors. Some people emigrate because of war or poor economies. Some people are perfectly well off but emigrate for even greater opportunities. The former is a push factor. The latter is a pull factor.

The most logical explanation for any political bias in some parts of the professoriate in my view is that the sort of persons with the skills to be in a major academic liberal arts department could also be successful in business, lobbying, law, advertising and other well-paying professions. And it is the corporate world and its lobbying appendages that have the marked bias, to the Right. Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn’t be comfortable in such a position. (All think tanks hire explicitly by ideology, and 17 of the 19 most influential ones in Washington are deliberately staffed by conservatives, but that doesn’t bother Will.)

Exhibit A is William J. Bennet. Bennett has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Texas. If he had been a man of the left, he would be teaching that subject at some small liberal arts college for $70,000 a year. Because he was on the Right, he had an entree to the Reagan administration, and rose to become Secretary of Education and then drug czar.

The vast opportunities open to an intellectual on the Right can be seen in Bennett’s career. It is often forgotten that he deserted public service as drug czar after only about a year, leaving all of his commitments unfulfilled. He was able to land at Joe Coors’s and Richard Mellon Scaife’s so-called American Heritage Foundation. Bennett’s opportunities were so many and so lucrative that the hard work of public service, and the ethics rules requiring careful reporting of income, seemed increasingly unappealing. The opportunities are so enormous, if one is willing to oppose affirmative action and support increasing inequality of wealth and bash unions, that it is even hard to keep such persons in high-profile, remunerative public service positions on the Right. They are sucked out of them by the corporate vacuum cleaner.

The next time we meet Bennett, he has somehow made so much money that he can drop $6 million in Las Vegas casinos in a single year (he says he won as much as he lost, which, if true, means he probably cheats). This level of gambling makes him a “whale” in casino terms, given all sorts of perquisites. That is a very different life than teaching in a small liberal arts college, having spent one’s youth making in the $20,000s and $30,000s a year (that would have been true of Bennett’s generation of academics). And the price of admission to all those riches? Say things like that “homosexuals” have an average lifespan of 42 years, or public education should be privatized, and blame poor people for being poor because they are lazy and immoral and gamble too much.

So, Mr. Will, it is the “pull” factor that explains your conundrum. Liberal academics aren’t viciously excluding conservative intellectuals who apply to teach hundreds of students a week for $45,000 a year (nowaday’s entry-level salary at a good liberal arts college), after they paid $100,000 for a Ph.D. in English literature from a top-rate university and spent 8 or 9 years beyond the BA toiling away as graduate students on tiny stipends. Conservative intellectuals don’t have to put up with that kind of thing (that is how they think of the privilege of teaching). They have other opportunities. They can be whales, and can pontificate on morality to the great unwashed.

As for Will’s argument that academia “has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies.” Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations — except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. ” — it is another instance of blaming the victim.

Academia has not marginalized itself. It has been marginalized. Perfectly reasonable beliefs such as that workers should have a right to explore unionizing without fear of being fired have been redefined by Joe Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife as “out of the mainstream.” Thinking that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq (as I said repeatedly in 2002 and early in 2003, even as I admitted Saddam’s atrocities) was defined as out of the mainstream and unpatriotic. Corporate media bring in a parade of so-called “experts” (often lacking credentials and saying ridiculous things) from “think tanks,” in Washington and New York instead of letting academics speak. (There are some exceptions, obviously, but I am talking about over-all numbers). Wouldn’t you like to hear about Ayman al-Zawahiri from someone who actually had read him in Arabic? The universities have such experts. The think tanks mostly just have smelly little orthodoxies of the Right.

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Elections in Iraq will be Held on Schedule, But with What Result?
Or, how Khatami and Krauthammer are Both Wrong

At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The US military said that guerrillas had launched a major campaign of intimidation aimed at frightening Sunni Arabs into boycotting the forthcoming elections.

Seventeen parties, mostly small Sunni Arab groupings along with the two major Kurdish parties, made a plea Saturday that elections be postponed. Some major Sunni Arab groups, such as the Association of Muslim Scholars, had already called for a Sunni Arab boycott.

Al-Jazeera interviewed Sunni cleric Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi on Saturday. He said that the Allawi government had not been elected and that Sunnis would not participate in illegitimate elections. The al-Jazeera anchor, a canny woman, asked al-Kubaisi how a legitimate government could be established without elections. Al-Kubaisi angrily retorted that there can be no legitimate elections under the shadow of foreign occupation. (This exchange belies the reputation in the US of al-Jazeera as the Fox Cable News of the Arab world. Would a Fox anchor have been that aggressive with, e.g., Jerry Falwell?)

Anyway, the plea for a postponement was roundly rejected on Saturday by all the most important actors. George W. Bush, US Ambassador to Baghdad John Negroponte, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Election Commissioner Abdul Hussein Hendawi, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his 3 colleagues in Najaf, and 43 major political parties, all voiced a resounding “No!” The first 3 would probably have been enough.

Even Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami, who was meeting with Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari, came out for holding the elections “as soon as possible.” Jaafari is leader of the Shiite Dawa Party, the most popular in Iraq. Khatami portrayed the issue as one of restoring security, suggesting that an elected government would have a better chance of calming the country. He said Iran had more of a stake in a stable Iraq than anyone else.

Khatami would probably have been better advised to keep his mouth shut. The struggle over postponing elections has already taken on a strong tinge of Sunni-Shiite struggle, especially since the Kurdish parties appear to have given at least lukewarm support to the plea of the Sunni Arabs for a delay (most Kurds are Sunnis; some Kurdish officials hedged their bets). Most of the major Iraqi players insisting on the election being held on time are Shiites, whether Arabs or Turkmen. To have Iraq’s Shiite neighbor also press for elections to be held makes it look as though the Shiites are ganging up on the Sunnis. That perception contributes to the guerrilla war in the first place.

Charles Krauthammer, after 18 months of blithe optimism on Iraq, has now suddenly decided that the country is embroiled in a Civil War and that the forthcoming elections will resemble those of 1864 in the United States, when the Confederate states did not vote for Lincoln.

As usual, Krauthammer is wrong. Historical analogies are always tricky, but this one is simply inaccurate. The problem is that Iraqis are not electing a president, even a war president. They are in effect electing a constitutional assembly. The main business of the new parliament is to craft a permanent constitution.

So, the analogy would be to 1789. What would the new American Republic’s chances have been if the Southern states had not been able to send delegates to the constitutional convention, and so had been excluded from having an input into it? All sorts of compromises had to be hammered out in 1789, concerning southern slavery and how to count a slave for census purposes, etc. If the South hadn’t been able to show up, the northern states would simply have ignored those issues, and the secession of those states might have come 70 years early. Would the North have been able to resist it so successfully at that point?

Likewise, Sunni Arabs have a big stake in the permanent constitution. Will it give Kirkuk and its oil to the Kurds, depriving Arabs of any share in those revenues? Will it ensconce Shiite law as the law of the land? Will it keep a unicameral parliament, in which Shiites would have a permanent majority, or will it create an upper chamber where Sunnis might be better represented, on the model of the US senate? If all those issues go against the Sunnis because they aren’t there to argue their positions, it would set Iraq up for guerrilla war into the foreseeable future.

And that is why Khatami’s hopes that an elected government will be more stable are unrealistic. It isn’t that the government is elected that lends stability, but rather widespread acceptance of the government’s legitimacy. The Sunnis are unlikely to grant that if they end up being woefully underrepresented. And then you will just have to reconquer Fallujah again next year. How long before you are just conquering rubble and snipers?

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat conducted a random poll of 100 Iraqis on Saturday, in person or by telephone, and found that about 60% wanted the elections to go forward, 35% wanted a postponement, and 6% refused to answer. It is not clear if “random” means “scientifically weighted.” If they just contacted 100 random persons, their poll probably isn’t worth much. If they tried to vary locale, social class, ethnicity and sex according to proportion in the population, then it would be more telling. They don’t say if the respondents were from different cities, e.g., or all in Baghdad.

Quentin Langley is wrong for much the same reasons that Krauthammer is. He gives 10 reasons for which he thinks the Iraq elections will be a “success.” Most of his points are made in apparent ignorance of the most basic facts about contemporary Iraq.

Langley’s ten reasons and my response:

“10. Despite the overwhelming media focus on trouble spots, these are all in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where just 20 percent of the population live.”

This allegation is simply incorrect. First of all, there is no “Sunni triangle.” The Sunni Arab heartland is more like a rectangle, and it is vast, encompassing much of the capital, Baghdad. Even if it were the only problem, it wouldn’t be a small one. In fact, “trouble spots,” if by that is meant things like carbombings, grenade and mortar attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi national guards, and machine gun fire, are all over the country. Tel Afar, Kirkuk, Hilla, Amarah, Majar al-Kabir, Samawah, Sadr City, etc., etc., routinely see “trouble spots.” While most of the guerrillas are Sunni Arabs, they have demonstrated an ability to strike all over the country. And, some of the problems come from other groups, whether Shiite Turkmen in the north or disgruntled Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen in the south.

If hundreds of people show up to a school to vote in Hilla and suddenly take mortar fire, with dozens killed, then will that really have no effect on turnout? What if such incidents occur all over the country? Maybe voters will be brave and refuse to be dissuaded from voting. Maybe they won’t. To pretend the problem does not exist or is limited to only a small part of the country, however, is to live in a fantasy-land.

“9. There are as many people in the Kurdish regions in the north, as there are in the Sunni Triangle. The Kurdish regions have had successful multi-party democracies for 12 years.”

This datum does not guarantee a successful outcome to the elections. The two major Kurdish parties have now developed cold feet about them because of fear of Shiite dominance. Moreover, the maximalist demands of the Kurds, for a consolidated Kurdish superprovince, for Kirkuk, for petroleum revenues to remain local, for permanent exclusion of Federal troops from their soil, are more likely to cause trouble themselves than to offset the troublesome Sunni Arabs.

“8. The majority Shias (60 percent of the population) are keen to participate. Spiritual leaders, including Ayatollah Sistani, have urged people to vote and even calling it a religious duty. Under this doctrine, people who don’t vote can go to hell.”

This point is true, but does not guarantee successful elections. In fact, if Shiite turnout is very big and Sunni Arab turnout low, it will create a tyranny of the Shiite majority, a special problem when parliament turns to constitution-making.

“7. The electoral system chosen (national lists) is not particularly vulnerable to intimidation. Votes are counted locally but the totals are calculated nationally, and seats in parliament are awarded in proportion to votes. A gang that intimidates voters locally will have almost no impact on the national vote.”

What an absurd thing to say. By the author’s own admission, intimidation is likely to be greater in the Sunni Arab heartland than in the Shiite south or Kurdish north. Therefore, the differential rate of intimidation could keep Sunni Arabs away from the polls in greater numbers than the other major ethnic groups, producing that tyranny of the Shiite majority of which I warned.

“6. A boycott by Sunnis would be counterproductive. In the U.S., representation is allocated to each state according to population. Under national lists, the weight of any region or strand of opinion is determined by turnout. If Sunnis stay at home, Sunni candidates don’t get elected.”

In history, peoples have done many things that are unproductive. The Shiites of Bahrain boycotted the first free elections in that country recently, allowing Sunni fundamentalists to dominate parliament in a country with a national Shiite majority. This point assumes that the author’s idea of what is rational is shared by the people he is analyzing, the classic “mirror” problem.

“5. The coalition has trained a new Iraqi army, which is taking on more and more of the security role.”

Among the more ridiculous claims this author has made. The “new Iraqi army” was largely useless in Fallujah, except for a handful of the braver Kurds and Shiites.

“4. The turnout is going to be huge. Liberal journalists will report on the day that turnout is disappointing, because they will only be counting in Baghdad. When votes come in from Kurdish and Shia areas it will prove to be even bigger than the American turnout, which itself was up by a fifth from 2000.”

Big Kurdish and Shiite turnouts and a low Sunni Arab turnout would not in fact be good news.

“3. People in Iraq are fed up with war.”

The tens of thousands of Iraqis determinedly fighting a guerrilla war are not fed up with war. They are prosecuting it.

“2. More and more people in Iraq have access to the Internet and other free information sources. They no longer have to trust government propaganda. Al Jazeera, and a growing network of Iraqi bloggers – most of whom regard Americans as allies – give Iraqis access to freedom of speech.”

These same media are being used by the guerrillas and by the boycotting parties. Many Sunni Arabs would not know that the Association of Muslim Scholars had called for a boycott if it were not for al-Jazeera’s interviews with its leaders.

“But the biggest reason the Iraqi elections will be a success is …

1. Western liberals who claim that Arabs don’t want or aren’t ready for democracy are just wrong. What liberals call “Western” values are human values. Arabs want to be free and to govern themselves just as much as people in Europe and America do.”

“Western liberals” for the most part haven’t said any such thing. It was the British and American Right that overthrew the last freely elected, democratic government of Iran, in 1953. The French encouraged the Algerian military to cancel the election results in 1991. Democracy in the Middle East has often been sought by its peoples, and has had no bigger enemy than the rightwing parties of Europe and the United States.

A statement such as “Arabs want to be free” is anyway mere propaganda. Which Arabs? When? Under what circumstances? The millions of Shiites who support Muqtada al-Sadr don’t appear to me to want to be free of puritanical restrictions or of charismatic authoritarianism. The millions of Sunni Arabs who are supporting the guerrilla war, actively or passively, don’t seem to want the kind of “freedom” Langley is imposing on them. A majority of Iraqis clearly want a new, parliamentary government to succeed, but significant minorities and maybe even a plurality do not. Glib statements by Westerners about what “Arabs” want are the New Orientalism, since the Western observers put themselves in the position of ventriloquists for their pliant Arab lap puppets. We don’t get to hear some of the real Arabs, like Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, in American media. Langley gets to substitute himself for them.

The success or failure of the political process in Iraq anyway has nothing to do with yearning for democracy. It has to do with the frankly stupid policies implemented by the Bush administration in Iraq. If the whole enterprise goes bad, it won’t be because the Iraqis couldn’t live up to Mr. Langley’s ideals. It will be because the Americans, especially the Neoconservatives, crafted a ridiculous electoral system based on that of Israel.

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