politics: Elections, American-occupation style

Well, after spending the day listening to the BBC World Service on my Sirius satellite radio (gads, this is really reading like a commercial so far!), but before hearing any of the liberal party line (and don't get me wrong, I toe that line more often than not, but I do at least try to think independently, I've been having some thoughts.

The day seems to have been far less bloody than it might've been, less bloody than I expected it to be. I think.

And the turnout seems to have been unexpectedly high. I think. This is a good thing, presumably. Democracy is, presumably, a good thing.

I think. I think. I think. Presumably. Why such prevarication?

Well, for one thing, what's this election for? To pick the people who'll write Iraq's constitution. The Bush regime paints this as a monumental and historic occasion, but who's actually getting elected to public office? No one, from what I'm led to understand. And once these people hammer out a constitution, any of Iraq's ethnic groups could essentially scuttle the whole thing and send the process back to the starting line. So at best it's a good place to start, but to give this election too much weight is to cheapen the potentially larger things that will, conceivably, come later. I think.

As for the election itself, there were fewer international observers to this election even than there were for the last US general election. Whence comes what we know about turnout, the mood of the electorate, the fairness of the voting? American military spokespeople and their servants in the interim Iraqi government. Now those are some impartial sources. Experience has taught us that they always give us the pure, unvarnished truth no matter how it hurts because their first loyalty is to verity.

Yeah, right.

Journalists from Iraq, too, are parroting this line. They're in Iraq, right? That gives them instant credibility.

Let me preface the following by saying that I know that there are journalists in Iraq who are in harm's way every day, busting their buns to tell a story that the masses almost never hear. But that's just my point. The ones we see and hear in the mass media have almost certainly been hunkered down in the safest and best-defended spots they can get to for the last couple of days out of a well-justified fear.

So where are they getting their stories? Same place, friends. Same place. The same voice out of two different mouths.

So who's counting the votes? And who's going to report the results? And I know that there are honorable and honest people devoted to democratic principles endeavoring to do the right thing over there. But it almost goes without saying that the US and interim Iraqi governments have a lot at stake here. And any time an entity has a personal interest in the story its trying to tell, you have to presume that there's a bias. And we know the Bush regime's fondness for propaganda and truth management.

So I don't think we've heard the truth yet. And I don't know if it was actually a successful election on any level. I hear the stories, and they're positive and I want to believe. But we've been lied to a few times too often.