Democracy is "Just Around the Corner"

While Bush stammered through his speech at the UN today, promising the moral equivalent of "a chicken in every Iraqi pot, and a car in every Iraqi garage," militants in Iraq claim to have executied Jack Hensley, the other American hostage taken in a raid on a Mansur district house in Baghdad last week. There's no word on the fate of the British national kidnapped in the same raid.

And in case anyone thinks that the resistance is somehow an isolated, "Sunni Triangle" event, here's a report by the BBC about how badly things have deteriorated in the area around Basra. The majority Sh'ia population was initially open to the British troops, who sensibly took a cautious approach to their mission. However, as the violence in Iraq forces people to take sides, don't expect too many to opt for going it with the foreigners (duh--is there any sane person on the planet who would do that?).

Finally, just to show that the north of Iraq is as capable of fighting and resisting as the south, check out this piece by Canadian journalist Scott Taylor--link via Fubar at Needlenose. By mostly pure luck, Taylor survived detention by Ansar al-Islam forces, who usually don't care much for ransoming hostages...they prefer to kill them.

Let's see--there's fighting in the north, the south is simmering, and the center is, um, more or less Baghdad, Fallujah/Ramadi, i.e., the Sunni Triangle. Sounds to me like support for the occupation doesn't exist, but there appears to be support for the disparate elements of the resistance.

That's not good when you need a degree of security and stability--which is what you will need if you expect democracy to take hold. Democracy works at least in part because there is a level of civil society setting the foundation. This, combined with a consent from the governed is where compacts like constitutions derive their authority.

Iraq has nothing even remotely approaching this sort of consent--that's why Allawi has to live behind concrete barricades. That's also why the US can't begin spending the reconstruction funds. When kidnapping and hostage taking are a "growth industry," in the words of Patrick Cockburn, you're not likely to find folks willing to undertake projects that require extensive amounts of time spent outdoors--unless you're surrounded by an army of guards.

With this in mind, consider this piece, written just as the invasion began, by Chuck O'Connell. No, he didn't get it all correct--but look at his predicion number 5:

Iraq will not be rebuilt into an affluent middle class nation...the mass of people will be forgotten by the prowar crowd and the government that waged the war to save the Iraqi people from Hussein. Eventually the misery of the Iraqi people will be blamed on the Iraqis themselves.

Hmmm. (Via Atrios), Oliver Willis found Donald Rumsfeld saying basically just that:

"At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we’ll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country and we’ll be able to pare down the coalition security forces in the country."

No wonder Rummy seemed all smiles when he met Saddam: