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Thread: an anti-american slant on the elections in iraq.

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    an anti-american slant on the elections in iraq.

    This is a news story out of iraq with a hardline anti-american slant. It is interesting in the fact that this is the crap we are up against in this country. Please understand that I do not agree with this view. I just was surprised to see it come up on my computer- I mean I have heard of such things but never got that close. wow what a load of crap.


    Iraq: Democracy or deception? Friday, 12 March 2010 00:00
    The Iraqis must be thanking George W. Bush for giving them democracy. If not for the March 2003 invasion by the US-led forces, the people, who voted in occupied Iraq's second general election on Sunday, would have been living in a hell lorded over by Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator. All those 1.3 million Iraqi people who were killed during and after the invasion have not died in vain.

    The Iraqis have also absolved the United States of the sins of invasion. After all, it is because of the US that they can now taste freedom, exercise their franchise and feel like kings. The US troops came to Iraq to liberate them and now they have achieved it — mission accomplished.

    This is the picture of occupied Iraq that one sees and hears of in the Western television media, widely seen as a powerful manipulator. Unlike the print media, the electronic media can show real people talking and expressing feelings. Behind the scenes, the big drama goes on. Television networks are known to edit and manipulate views expressed by various people. Only if the views complement the agenda of the corporate media or of the capitalists or of the occupying power, are they entertained.

    These vetted views are often presented as those of a cross section of Iraqi society. Listening to these views, we, the fools who sit in front of the idiot box, hail Bush and hail his successor, Barack Obama for turning Saddam's hell into a paradise. For, we do not see pictures of imperialism or neo-colonialism.

    Sunday's general elections in Iraq are part of the imperialistic agenda. Democracy in Iraq now serves the US interest. Once, it was Iraq's dictatorship that served the US imperialistic agenda. In the 1980s, Saddam was the darling of the United States. He received US weapons, satellite intelligence and moral support, when he went to war with neighbouring Iran. During this nine-year war, Saddam used chemical weapons. The chemicals for these weapons came from US companies. The fact that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction did not become an international issue then underscores a global truth: It is the West which decides what an international issue is.

    The West has made Iran's nuclear programme an international issue that needs to be addressed because it threatens world peace, but won't make an issue out of Israel's 300-odd nuclear weapons. The manner in which Sri Lanka won its civil war may constitute war crimes, but the deaths of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan in US and Nato air attacks may not. Political suppression in Myanmar and the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi are unacceptable and condemned, but Hosni Mubarak's Egypt where thousands of political prisoners are languishing in torture chambers is rewarded with billions of dollars in US aid annually. The Palestinian people who are fighting for their freedom are called terrorists, while Israel's suppression of the Palestinian uprising is projected as survival of a tiny democracy surrounded by hostile Arab nations.



    In this game of deception, democracy is a pawn, as Iraq has well and truly proved. With the United States pulling the strings, democracy in Iraq is a sham.

    Take for instance, the 2005 general elections, Iraq's first since the US occupied that country. The Dawa Party led by Ibrahim al-Jaafari won the elections and was ready to form a coalition government. But Jaafari could not become the prime minister, because the US did not want him. A standoff continued for months, before compromise candidate Nouri al-Maliki became the prime minister. The incident taught Iraqis, especially politicians, a lesson: In US-guided democracies, elected representatives must serve the US interest.

    The Maliki government survived its full term largely because it knew how to serve the US interest, despite criticism from Iraqi nationalists.

    Followers of the radical cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, whom the Newsweek Magazine branded as Iraq's most dangerous man, and other nationalists have accused al-Maliki of surrendering the nation's oil wealth to international companies. Iraq sits on 115 billion barrels of unexploited crude oil. Last year, it conducted two auctions to sell exploration rights of some of the oil deposits to foreign firms. More will be sold this year. At the elections campaign, al-Maliki tried to woo voters by saying that Iraq's future lay in its ability to convert the oil into dollars.

    Of course, such a slogan is jazz to the ears of US capitalists, who thrive on wars and disasters. Before the ground troops moved into Iraq in March 2003, US fighter jets and cruise missiles destroyed Iraq's electricity grid, water supply facilities, communications network, and major industrial sites. Once in control of Iraq, hundreds of billions of dollars worth contracts to rebuild the damaged infrastructure went to US firms such as San Francisco-based Bechtel and Houston-based Halliburton, where Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney was once a CEO.

    Though some of the money to pay the contractors came from US taxpayers, much of it came from Iraq's oil sales. To facilitate the payment, the United States wasted no time to lift the UN sanctions that had restricted Iraq's oil sales. The whole episode smacks of greedy capitalism. Socialist writer Naomi Klein in her well-researched book 'The Shock Doctrine' calls the business of making money out of misery 'disaster capitalism'.



    The capitalists need wars because wars provide new markets for their goods and services. Just look at the list of top US exports. It largely consists of heavy electrical machinery, transport equipment, general industrial machinery, power-generating machinery and telecommunications equipment. Obviously, in war-ravaged Iraq, there is a vast demand for such equipment.

    The rebuilding process is not yet over. Neither is the business of plundering Iraq's oil and wealth. It is to sustain this process that democracy is promoted in Iraq. Democracy often produces a handful of people's representatives who are corruptible — who sell themselves to the highest bidder. These dollar democrats in parliament can guarantee an easy passage for Iraq's oft-deferred oil bill that favours multinationals. It is in this context that the composition of the next coalition government in Iraq is of much interest to capitalists and oil giants such as Shell, Exxon, Mobil and BP.

    Reports from Iraq say al-Maliki's State of Law Alliance, former prime minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya alliance and the Fadhilla alliance that has brought together Muqtada al-Sadr's group and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Republic of Iraq are claiming substantial gains at the elections. Indications are that no single party will be in a position to form a government of its own. The attendant political chaos could be compounded by the unseating of some elected members on the basis that they were once members of the Baath Party which Saddam headed.

    Fishing in the troubled waters will be Iraq's Kurds. Controlling one fifth of parliament, they will offer their support to any party to form a government only if they obtain a promise that the autonomous province of Kurdistan will get the oil-rich Kirkuk region whose pre-dominantly Kurdish character underwent a sea change under Saddam's Arabisation programme. Thus it may take many months and several horse-deals before a government is finally formed.

    Meanwhile, democracy has not ended Iraq's violence. On election day, 35 people died in three bomb attacks. If violence escalates while Iraq is facing a post-poll political crisis, it may delay the withdrawal of US forces. According to the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the two countries, the US troops should start withdrawing from Iraq in August this year. A weak government that is unable to deal with the insurgency could give the US an excuse to prolong its occupation.



    http://www.dailymirror.lk/print/inde...ion1/5789.html

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    I would like to meet this guy and teach him about democracy.

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    It is quite funny that we have spent billions of dollars over there, much more has been spent than if we would have bought the oil!

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    Thanks for the post.

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