What Does Democracy Really Mean In The Middle East? by Robert Fisk

[laststeamtrain]

What Does Democracy Really Mean In The Middle East? Whatever The West Decides

Sometimes I Wonder If There Will Be A Moment When Reality And Myth, Truth And Lies, Will Collide

by Robert Fisk; The Independent; August 20, 2005

It makes you want to scream. I have been driving the dingy, dangerous, oven-like streets of Baghdad all week, ever more infested with insurgents and their informers, the American troops driving terrified over the traffic islands, turning their guns on all of us if we approach within 50 metres.

In the weird, space-ship isolation of Saddam’s old republican palace, the Kurds and the Shia have been tearing Iraq apart, refusing to sign up for a constitution lest it fail to give them the federations - and the oil wealth - they want. They miss their deadline - though I found no one in "real" Baghdad, no one outside the Green Zone bunker, who seemed to care.

And that evening, I turn on my television to hear President Bush praise the "courage" of the constitution negotiators whose deadline Bush himself had promised would be met.

Courage? So it’s courageous, is it, to sit in a time capsule, sealed off from your people by miles of concrete walls, and argue about the future of a nation which is in anarchy. Then Condoleezza Rice steps forward to tell us this is all part of the "road to democracy" in the Middle East...

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=8551§ionID=107

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Condi is so.... yesterday. We need new spinmeisters to spice

things up a bit.

[rodeodance]

2. "Democracy, democracy, democracy."--is this the spice you looking for?

......Yet in the outside world - the further from Iraq, the more credible they sound - George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will repeat that we really have got democracy on its feet in Iraq, that we overthrew the tyrant Saddam and that a great future awaits the country and that new investments are being planned at international conferences (held far away from Iraq, of course) and that the next bombings in Europe, like the last ones, will have nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with Iraq.

The show must go on and I know, when I return to Beirut or fly to Europe, Iraq will not look so bad. The Mad Hatter will look quite sane and the Cheshire Cat will smile at me from the tree.

Democracy, democracy, democracy. Take Egypt. President Mubarak allows opponents in the forthcoming elections. Bush holds this up as another sign of democracy in the Middle East. But Mubarak’s opponents have to be approved by his own party members in parliament, and the Muslim Brotherhood - which ought to be the largest party in the country - is still officially illegal. Sitting in Baghdad, I watched Mubarak’s first party rally, a mawkish affair in which he actually asked for support. So who will win this "democratic" election? I’ll take a risk: our old pal Mubarak. And I’ll bet he gets more than 80 per cent of the votes. Watch this space.

And of course, from my little Baghdad eyrie I’ve been watching the eviction of Israelis from their illegal settlements in the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The word "illegal" doesn’t pop up on the BBC, of course; nor the notion that the settlers - for which read colonisers - were not being evicted from their land but from land they originally took from others. Nor is much attention paid to the continued building in the equally illegal colonies within the Palestinian West Bank which will - inevitably - make a "viable" (Lord Blair’s favourite word) Palestine impossible.......