Demagogue

The idea behind my "write the story before the event" contest was that most American reporters could probably write their Iraq election stories now, since what actually happens on Sunday isn't going to affect their papers'/stations' upbeat coverage (or at worst an on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand story).

If that's right, The Economist isn't going to win the contest. Then again, it's not an American news outlet. Also, it's written and edited by intelligent people. Even though I disagree with a lot (certainly not all) of the magazine's politics, I have to say they're pretty decent about reporting stuff that hurts their position. Here's the lede of their latest:

The ballots cast by Iraqis on Sunday may mark the start of a long and arduous journey towards stability and freedom for Iraqis. Or the beginning of a descent into anarchy, civil war and the break-up of the country.

Gee, that's not the kind of feel-good news we want in these gray and chilly midwinter days. If anything, the lede is deceptively optimistic. The story makes it clear which of those two outcomes the reporter thinks is more likely, and it's not the Freedom-spreading one. Along the way, they point out that whatever the future holds, the present isn't too good:



Regarding the election, the article not only sounds a grim note but also rejects several Bush administration spin points (though without mentioning that the administration has been pushing them). I'll helpfully put those bits in bold:

The fear of assassination has meant that, by and large, only the most senior party leaders have done any visible campaigning. The names of most of the 7,000 candidates for the 275-seat Iraqi national assembly have been kept secret until the last minute, for fear of making them an assassination target.

On Thursday, an insurgent group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian affiliated to al-Qaeda, released a videotape of the killing of a candidate from the party of Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister.

[snip]

Iraq’s Shia Muslims, around 60% of the 25m-27m population, will be torn between the fatwa issued by the country’s most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, instructing the faithful to cast their votes, and the fear of being blown up at the ballot box or murdered afterwards. The marking of voters’ fingers with indelible ink, to prevent multiple voting, will also make them an identifiable target long after polling day.

[snip]

Yet the number of active insurgents, though hard to count, is plainly swelling. The head of Iraq's intelligence service suggested earlier this month that there were 40,000 hard-core rebels, with another 160,000-odd Iraqis helping them out. That is several times the standard, albeit rough, estimate of a year ago.

[snip]

Moreover, the current relative calm among the Shia Arabs could be illusory. The notion that all but four provinces are safe is false. Armed gangs and a vast criminal underworld hold sway in many parts of the country. A rebellious young clerical firebrand, Muqtada al-Sadr, and his thuggish militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have been lying low since Mr Sistani talked them out of their rebellion against American occupation late last summer. But they control swathes of the centre and south, and the Americans have consistently underestimated the Sadrists’ power and reach. Though Mr Sadr himself is staying out of the election fray, he might well urge his men to rise up again if he or his group were cut out of a power-sharing deal.

[snip]

Unemployment is stuck, officially, at 30-40%, though some economists reckon that more than half of Iraqis are jobless. Basic utilities are still wretched. Last week, nearly half of Baghdadis had no running water. Motorists are again queuing, sometimes for 12 hours, to fill up with petrol.

[snip]

Mr Allawi argues that, provided the Americans do not cut and run, the insurgency can be contained, if not beaten. The main plan is to beef up the home-grown Iraqi forces (now totalling 127,000 against an eventual goal of 273,000), enabling the Americans and their allies to wind down steadily their troop numbers. This, within the next few years, is a false hope. The Iraqi forces are utterly feeble. At present, only some 5,000 of them are a match for the insurgents; perhaps as many as 12,000 are fairly self-sufficient. Most of the rest are unmotivated, unreliable, ill-trained, ill-equipped, prone to desertion, even ready to switch sides. If the Americans left today, they would be thrashed.

[snip]

Most insurgents are above all nationalists. The government might accommodate many of them if they could be convinced that the Americans were certain to leave—if not immediately, at least soon.

[snip]

For the past year, chaos has increased, along with ordinary Iraqis' hatred of the American occupation. But they also hate “the beheaders”—the likes of Mr Zarqawi. The emergence of a new government with a popular mandate will not change the situation overnight. It may be too late for any government seen to be sponsored by the Americans to establish itself. Nothing is certain—except that much more blood will be shed, and even more if Iraq's Sunni Arabs continue to feel disenfranchised.

Simple George can't cope with this truth, so he makes reality-based people like Colin Powell leave and prohibits anyone else from giving him bad news. Those of us who doubt the wisdom of holding an election now and question the likely legitimacy of any resulting government just think that Arabs are incapable of democracy. The insurgents are all out there killing people simply because they hate freedom. The wonder isn't that Dubya won the election. The wonder is that anyone takes him seriously.

Last point: remember around the beginning of the war when the inevitable This is going to be another Vietnam/No it isn't harangues were making the rounds? One notable, and possible crucial, similarity has taken shape (among others; and no, I'm not saying the two wars are identical). The Economist simply states what seems to an outsider like me to be pretty obvious: 40,000 insurgents plus 160,000 supporters don't risk life and limb because they hate freedom; they do it because they don't want a bunch of foreigners running their country. Just as we miscalculated the extent to which the Viet Cong, and to some extent even the NVA, were motivated by nationalism rather than communism (and certainly more by nationalism than by helping the Soviet Union in its global fight with the U.S.), the Bushies seem to have convinced themselves that the insurgents are of a piece with al Qaeda and are nothing more than freedom-hating terrorists, when in fact most of them are nationalists. Sure, you've got murderous nutjobs like Zarqawi there, but most of the insurgency is anti-occupation, not anti-freedom or pro-theocracy. If we keep calling them all "terrorists" and acting as if that's all they are, we'll consistently underestimate the support they have among the civilian population and the even larger sympathy civilians have for their anti-occupation cause (shades of Vietnam), and we'll just make a bigger and bigger mess of things.