There’s one result democracy is guaranteed to produce in the Middle East. When it’s on the march, people are on the run.
In this instance hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing south, a step ahead of the rapidly advancing jihadists led by the warlord Abu Dua. As they run, they’re pursued by a rapidly congealing tsunami threatening to sweep across the whole region.
The forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have already seized two major cities, Mosul (where much of Iraq’s oil is) and Tikrit. By the looks of it, Baghdad may well be next, while the ISIS already controls the adjacent area of Syria.
Abu Dua’s people hate the West with hysterical fervour, that’s a given. But the West is rather far away and still strong enough to defend itself against the slings and arrows of aggression, if not the pinpricks of terrorism.
For the time being Abu Dua’s black-clad troops can vent their unused bile on other groups they also loathe, those closer at hand. Mainly it’s the Kurds and the Shiites who make up the majority of Iraq’s population.
When al-Qaeda chaps are hot, they’re hot, and even their coreligionist Sunnis are finding themselves on the receiving end of egregious violence. So it’s not just the Shiites and the Kurds who are running for their lives.
When American neoconservatives, who’ve substituted democracy worship for more traditional religions, were cheering the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I spoke to one of their prominent British acolytes.
“Don’t you lot realise this will end in disaster?” I asked, somewhat rhetorically. “It may,” he replied. “But it’s still good to prod the hornets’ nest.”
Well, prod the nest they did, and the hornets are stinging thousands dead – in a vain attempt to teach our warmongering democracy-hounds a lesson. Wasted effort: ideologues never learn, no matter how many mutilated corpses are used as visual aids.
It was all oh-so terribly predictable. Democracy, in its post-modern perversion, can’t fulfil its promise even in the countries that enjoyed the real thing for centuries.
It can no longer function as a just and truly representative form of government even in its native habitat. All it’s good for these days is sloganeering designed to rally enough support for the ideologues to indulge their lust for power.
The peculiar trait of the neocons, whose movement was started by Trotskyists, is that the boundaries of their own countries can’t contain their indomitable bellicosity. Foreign wars are a must, except nowadays it’s not world revolution but democracy they’ve inscribed on their banners.
This particular slogan still carries a lot of weight since most people don’t realise that, contrary to its thunderous claims, our virtual democracy pushes power away from the people, not closer to them.
Those who vote our governments in have no idea what sort of outrages are being perpetrated in their name. It has all become a megalomaniac game of virtual reality: governments pretend they’re acting in the people’s interests, the people pretend they believe them.
That’s why it’s relatively easy to rally what passes for public opinion these days behind yet another asinine foreign adventure. All it takes is a bit of scaremongering backed up by a few rigged intelligence reports – and Dubya is your uncle, Tony is your aunt.
Thus George W. Bush and his poodle Tony ‘Yo’ Blair combined their forces to drag the two countries into a war whose aims they falsified and for whose end they didn’t even try to plan.
Anyone without an ideological fire in his belly and with an IQ above room temperature (Centigrade) knew it would come to grief. Saddam was a monster and a sadist, but one thing he wasn’t was a jihadist.
Both he and his Ba’athist mate Assad kept Muslim fanatics at bay because they correctly saw them as a threat to their own power. Their countries were pressure cookers bubbling with toxic hatred, and the two chaps relied on rather unsavoury but successful methods to keep the lid on.
Trying to replace their regimes with Western-style democracies was idiotic to the point of being criminal, and I for one would love to see our two democracy champions tried for war crimes. The only possible result was to create a power vacuum, and these are always filled by the most impassioned groups.
In this case it meant jihadists, and the only way to keep them down was to replace Saddam’s violence with the Anglo-American variety. That wasn’t on the cards, not for long.
Anyone familiar with the history of American conflicts, especially the disaster of Vietnam, knew that tricking all of the people all of the time would prove impossible. Then too the country ran out of political will to finish the military job.
Sure enough, after a few years of growing casualties and attenuating will, first the British and then the Americans withdrew from Iraq, tails between their legs.
By way of a smokescreen covering the retreat they laid on a thick fog of lies, perpetuated by the successors to our would-be war criminals. These are exemplified by the comment of the National Security Council on the current calamity: “President Obama promised to responsibly end the war in Iraq and he did”.
Never mind the grammar, feel the lie. Responsibly? This must be the newspeak for irresponsibly. So what did Obama mean by his claim to responsibly have ended the war? (Sorry if I’m using the split infinitive without any natural flair for this grammatical perversion.)
Why, democracy of course. Wasn’t that what Dubya, Tony and the neocons decided was the aim of the war? Granted, that wasn’t the original aim, but them good folks from Texas are allowed to change their minds – and their stooges’ minds as well.
Obama confirms: “We ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state could make decisions about its own future.” Methinks the ‘fully sovereign Iraqi state’ is about to have a few decisions made for it, doubtless to the accompaniment of the neocons’ loud cheers.
What are we going to do about the unfolding catastrophe? Well, in broad strokes, not to cut too fine a point – nothing. A square root of sod-all or, in the more polite words of Foreign Secretary William Hague, “We’re not countenancing any British military involvement at this stage.”
Or at any other stage actually. We’ll just sit back and enjoy the show. Democracy has been served.