IRAQ

Guardian: Democracy only grows from below, US-British policy has ensured that
genuine Iraqi opposition is broken

When the B52s went in, there was not even a semblance of a democratic
force in Iraq that could make a revolution against Saddam or form the nucleus
of a new democratic order there. Why? Chiefly because the US and UK
supported Saddam when he smashed all opposition in the 1980s, provoked uprisings
in 1991 and made sure Saddam could crush them, and, ever since, starved
the people and wrecked the country's infrastructure and industry in 12
years of sanctions. Freed from such devastating interventions, who knows what
democratic organisations and opposition might have evolved, even under
the Saddam dictatorship?

In the event, all that has been created on the pile of corpses in this
war (and most people die in such a war not by being shot or bombed
directly, but from loss of limb, blood, disease or plague) is a political vacuum
into which plunge a host of contractors, bounty hunters, looters and
minorities terrified of another round of persecution. In this chaos, the only
beneficiaries are the millionaires and their toadying politicians who
caused it in the first place. Our political leaders promise elections,
as though poor dismembered Iraq can be compared to East Germany or
Czechoslovakia or Indonesia or Serbia after their tyrants were deposed
in the 1980s and 1990s. In all those countries, elections followed close
on the end of the dictatorships. But in all those countries the tyrants
were toppled by movements from below. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the
tyrants were toppled from above, by stronger military power in other countries.
In Afghanistan, they are still waiting for elections and will wait a long
time yet, but not as long, I expect, as in Iraq.