Congratulations to the people of Iraq, who held an historic vote yesterday. Regardless of the wisdom of our choice to invade the country, we can all be happy to see the first steps toward what hopefully becomes a functioning democracy, complete with campaign-finance laws and gerrymandering. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to go to a polling place and cast a meaningful ballot after a lifetime of dictatorship, but I imagine it must be a remarkable feeling.
Seems like the vote went fairly smoothly, at least by local standards, although there were some unfortunate incidents. Even the Aljazeera account was largely indistinguishable from those in the Western press, except for these short paragraphs near the end:
After casting his vote in the western city of Ramadi, 21-year-old Jamal Mahmoud said: “I’m delighted to be voting for the first time because this election will lead to the American occupation forces leaving Ramadi and Iraq,” echoing a belief common among voters across the war-torn country.
In the holy city of Najaf, stronghold of the ruling Shia Islamist Alliance’s list No. 555, 40-year-old Abdullah Abdulzahra said: “I’ll vote for 555 because they’ll kill all Baathists.”
I think that Ann Coulter might have a future in Iraqi punditry.
The best news is that the Sunnis turned out in large numbers, indicating a willingness to join the new government as full participants. How smoothly that will go remains to be seen; some prognostications at Crooked Timber by Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies. Regardless, an historic occasion, hopefully the first of many in the region.
Count Iblis,
Iraq was a police state. Periodic mass killings is standard procedure. Look at the history of the People Republic of China or the Soviet Union or even Syria. It is completely unrealistic to suppose that if Saddam or his sons Uday and Cusay had retained power that they would not have had to put down an uprising over the next 40 years.
Moreover, I did not include the 500,000 death due to the Iran-Iraq war.
Lastly, you’re the one who is unadvisedly using death count as measure of quality of life. According to that standard, if Saddam Hussein had taken over the United States, outlawed private cars, thus reduced traffic deaths by 40,000, American would be a better place. Provided, of course, that Saddam tortured or otherwise killed no more that 39,999 people.
Even using your crude measure of quality of life (in which freedom has no value), you are wrong.
Dissident, Iran is just behaving just like any other country would behave in similar circumstances. Their behavior is not always rational but it is still predictable.
The US want their program to be scrapped. At first they didn’t want Iran to have any nuclear technology at all. Europe just wants to avoid a repeat of the diplomatic problems with the US they had at the time of the Iraq war.
I’m not at all comfortable with Iran having nukes. But the way to stop Iran from getting nukes is to keep Iran in the NPT. If we punish Iran for doing things they are allowed to do (enrich uranium under IAEA inspections regime), just because they might in the future pull out of the NPT (and enrich uranium without IEAE supervision to make a bomb), Iran will just leave the NPT right now.
Also, even if Iran would agree with the demands to scrap their enrichment program, we would still need to verify that they aren’t enriching uranium in secret. To do that we would need to have a tough inspections regime. There is little chance the Iranians would agree with that.
Belizean, we don’t know how the situation in Iraq would have evolved. China and the Soviet Union both evolved to reasonable normal countries after Mao and Stalin died.
If the US had known that Stalin was about to get the A-bomb in 1949 and would help the North Koreans to fight the US you could only imagine what could have happened. But as it turned out, Stalin did not do foolish things with his nukes. Also, it was McArthur who wanted to use nukes against China and the Soviet Union.
No, Belizean, every single one of your talking points haved been elaborately refuted.
1. For your incorrect claims about infant mortality, see here.
2. Falluja was specifically excluded, as an outlier, in their statistical analysis, so the number of deaths there is irrelevant to their conclusion.
3. The 95% confidence interval is wide, but it definitely excludes zero. You might have thought that there was some chance that stopping Saddam’s killing machine might have had a salutory effect on civilian death rates.
I could go on and rebut the rest of your points. But, as I said, others have already done so.
While we are considering dangerous ideas to worry about in the new year, here’s one of my top candidates:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060103/news_mz1e3hirsch.html
Count Iblis, here’s something for you:
http://economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5405046