On Wednesday 2005-02-09 12:43, Gary Denton wrote: > With a slow connection I don't do video feeds but am glad they > recognize the sacrifices our troops are making. > > My nephew the Army Ranger is back in Iraq. He was protecting the > vote. He is at Mosul, where they had 10% voter turnout. I was doing a > calculation the other day - it looks like Iraqi voter turnout as > percentage of voting age population was much lower than we might have > heard here. They did not meet the goal of 50%. I guess our so-called > liberal media missed that call. When final results are in I suspect > we will have helped the Iraqis elect their equivalent of the Taliban. > Sioldiers die to do whatever the politicians want, we should have > better men as politicians. At least as good as our soldiers. > > - Gary Denton > Easter Lemming Liberal News Digest
The election for the Iraqi interim parliament and constitutional covention was a general national poll, based on party lists, with proportional representation. Arab Shia voted at relatively high rates. Kurds (mostly Sunni) would also have voted as would most of the small minorities (Turkomen and Christians, and others). Lets _assume_ that Kurds and small minorities voted at near the overall median rate for the election. The Arab Sunni, already very touchy about their minority status, to a significant degree boycotted the vote, resulting in participation figures along the lines you quote for Mosul of 10% (Mosul is dominated by Arab Sunni I understand). The Taliban regard themselves as ultra-Sunni from Hanbali-Wahhabi-Deobandi school of Sunni tradition. Those most sympathetic to the Taliban were reactionary Arab Sunnis; just those least likely to vote (and most likely to be rabidly anti-Shia). If Iraq becomes Taliban-like it will NOT be the result of these elections, but due to violence. On the other hand, early results show the biggest winner, and possibly a super-majority in its own right, to be the Shia party most closely tied to the Ayatollahs. Iran (and even more the Iranian model) has considerable influence with this group. Ayatollah Khomeini was a brilliant thinker and was instrumental in comming up with the idea of Wallayit al-Faqih [spelling guaranteed wrong], government by religious jurists. Iran's constitution and regime are one experiment in instantiating this innovative theory of theocratic government. One condition for implementing a wallayit al-faqih is that the overwhelming majority of the population be at least nominally Shia. Thus, the mullahs and ayatollahs imposed wallayit al-faqih on Iran, but Hizbollah did not do so in Lebanon despite their millitary and propagandistic strength. In Iraq about two-thirds of the population are Shia, so even if your caucus supports jurisprudential republican theocracy in the abstract, it might oppose it as an impractical and unjust imposition on a large minority. I am expecting the Iraqi Constitutional Covention to produce something like Iran-Lite, either a watered down Jurisprudential Theocratic Republic with a mixed bench of Shia and Sunni judges and a troika presidency or a liberal republic with lots of theocratic constraints enforced by Islamic jurists. The interesting question will be how ShrubCo reacts to a constitutional document that produces either a theocratic republic (albeit weaker than in Iran), or a federal democratic republic with a strong theocratic judicial branch. The other problem will be how paranoid the virulently anti-Shia principalities in the Gulf react to having a second strong Shia polity as a neighbor. Back around the start of the 20th century, Wahhabi Ikhwan committed massacres of Shia. Wahhabi-Deobandi groups often have hatred of Shia as an article of dogma. This is even more durable than hatred of Americans or Jews, because those hatereds only surface with contact and conflict. With Americans and Jews W-D's could agree to live and let live. Shia are hated as corrupt crypto-polytheist Muslims. Theoretically, Shia must be sought out and purged. So no worries about electing Taliban, worry instead about electing an Ayatollah. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
