Seumus Milne (Guardian Utd): Iraq could plunge further into the abyss

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Thursday January 13

This election could plunge Iraq further into the abyss
Rigged polls held under foreign occupation have a notorious pedigree
By Seumas Milne

They are routinely described by the BBC as Iraq's first free and democratic elections - sometimes for half a century, sometimes in the country's history. During his lightning stopover in Baghdad last month, Tony Blair insisted that whatever you had thought of the war, no one could now avoid taking sides in what had become a simple "battle between democracy and terror" in Iraq. And even if enthusiasm for the elections scheduled for January 30 is usually tempered by an admission that they are bound in practice to prove "imperfect", there is a widespread view in the occupying countries that they offer the best chance to begin to lift the country out of its current misery.
We have, of course, been here before. Every landmark since the US and British invasion nearly two years ago has been claimed as a turning point for the occupation, the moment when support for the resistance would start to recede and a new, showcase Iraq emerge from the blood-drenched devastation. And no doubt for those who thought Iraqis would welcome their invaders with flowers, that they wouldn't resist foreign occupation, that Saddam Hussein's capture would take the wind out of the fighters' sails, that last June's handover of sovereignty would be seen as genuine and that the punitive destruction of Falluja would break the back of the insurgency - for them, this month's planned ballot will surely seem to be the crucial event that must at last deliver legitimacy to the puppet regime holed up in Baghdad's infamous green zone.

But, in reality, the elections are likely at best to be irrelevant, at worst to plunge Iraq deeper into the abyss. Both common sense and first principles dictate that no election in a country invaded and controlled by foreign troops can conceivably be regarded as free and fair. The poll due on January 30 is part of a process imposed by Bush's proconsul Paul Bremer, transparently designed to entrench US plans for Iraq and the wider Middle East; all the main politicians and parties taking part owe their position and physical survival to US protection and power; and voting will take place in a country under martial law, where a full-scale guerrilla war is raging and whose heartlands are under daily bombardment.

Falluja, a city of 350,000 people, has been razed to the ground in the past couple of months and its people expelled to refugee camps, where they have less chance to vote (even if they wanted to) than Iraqi refugees living in Britain. The US-appointed government has cracked down on the recalcitrant press and expelled the independent al-Jazeera TV station, while the hands of any future administration have been tied by a US-imposed neoliberal economic programme.

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