Noam Chomsky: "Beyond the Ballot"

[kpete]

Beyond the Ballot
by Noam Chomsky

The US President Bush called last month’s Iraqi elections a "major milestone in the march to democracy." They are indeed a milestone — just not the kind that Washington would welcome. Disregarding the standard declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, let’s review the history. When Bush and Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, invaded Iraq, the pretext, insistently repeated, was a "single question": Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?

Within a few months this "single question" was answered the wrong way. Then, very quickly, the real reason for the invasion became Bush’s "messianic mission" to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East. Even apart from the timing, the democratisation bandwagon runs up against the fact that the United States has tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq.

Last January’s elections came about because of mass nonviolent resistance, for which the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani became a symbol. (The violent insurgency is another creature altogether from this popular movement.) Few competent observers would disagree with the editors of the Financial Times, who wrote last March that "the reason (the elections) took place was the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them."

Elections, if taken seriously, mean you pay some attention to the will of the population. The crucial question for an invading army is: "Do they want us to be here?"

read the whole thing at: (I loved it)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0106-34.htm

[Peace Patriot]

1. Well, the great irony to ME is that we don't have transparent elections,

or anything even closely resembling them, HERE, in the home of the brave and the land of the free. I KNOW they don't have them in Iraq, partly because you can't have a truly free election with over 100,000 foreign troops on your soil watching your every move--let alone with dark outfits like CACI, Titan and Halliburton running their own operations, and Porter Goss's CIA doing the Bush Cartel's bidding there. Many of the true representatives of the Iraqi people have probably been quietly assassinated (as these same Reagan-Bush operatives did in Nicaragua, El Salvador and other places). The Constitution they "voted" on--written by Bush Cartel lawyers--was something hardly anybody read, because copies were not available. And basically what it did was carve up Iraq into three parts, giving the Kurds and Shias the oil, and cutting out the Sunnis (the more educated class, the ones with business and worldly savvy). The Cartel will now possibly withdraw sufficient US troops to let the Kurds and Shias go on a killing spree against the Sunnis. Anyway, so much for free elections in Iraq. It's not a free country. Elections devised by the Bush Cartel are meaningless.

As for our elections, analysis isn't needed. Our election system is fraudulent on its face. Bushite corporations--Diebold and ES&S--control the tabulation of all of our votes with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code in the new electronic voting systems, with virtually no audit/recount controls. They partially controlled the "results" in the 2002 by-elections. They fully controlled the "results" in 2004.

How could anybody trust the "results" of such a voting system? It's absurd.

(I won't get into how/why the Democratic Party leadership let this happen, except to say that, although it appears on the surface to be insane, on the part of the Democrats, it does have causes. About a third of our Dem leaders are corrupt, another third favor Bush's war in the Middle East and are corrupt, and the remaining third--the only politicians in the country who represent the majority of Americans--have little power and get bullied and shut out by the two thirds who are corrupt and/or pro-war. These are my own surmises, based on a certain about of investigation and evidence. I also think there is a fear factor--fear of Diebold and ES&S and those behind them, fear of the Bushi'ites, fear of corrupt local election officials who are beholden to Diebold and ES&S, fear of losing what little power and privilege they have, fear of getting anthraxed, fear of their planes falling out of the sky, and so on. Lots of fear.)