Fighting for Democracy

It seems like everybody’s doing it – fighting, killing and dying for such high (and mighty) ideals as freedom and democratic elections. Sooner or later, every war boils down to the same old rhetoric. What’s unusual about this endless war in Iraq is how quickly all the other excuses for invasion and occupation have melted away to irrelevancy, and a farcical nightmare has resulted where both the occupying army and the Iraqi insurgency are fighting over the definition of just one word: Democracy.

The Bush Administration seems to be learning a lot about how to run an occupation from our fellow Judeo-Christian brethren in arms, Israel, who learned about counter-insurgency the hard way from Nazi Germany. It is crucial to always have an initiative on the table, a "roadmap" if you will, to fight on the most important battlefield of all: diplomacy. How way leads on to way, and a nonchalant stroll through Poland can become a blitzkrieg from Paris to Moscow. These days, the science of global domination has been refined, and Israel’s diplomatic "path to peace" has more twists and checkpoints than the road from Hebron to East Jerusalem.

Israelis are in the awkward position of supposedly fighting for both democracy and a fundamentalist state by occupying Palestine. Their official policies of racist housing demolitions, collective punishment, and assassinations have met both international condemnation and emulation by the United States in its rule over Iraq. Human Rights Watch recently reported that the US military has been in violation of the Geneva Convention by unnecessarily demolishing houses. HRW also reported that the relatives of Iraqi fugitives were often held without justification. Is it really too much to ask that we rise above taking hostages?

The best strategy of occupation is to simply keep the world distracted, or to shoot at all the unfriendly journalists (even Americans!). Israel already controls most of the water, has all of the nuclear weapons in the region, many billions of dollars in military and economic aid from the U.S., and de-facto rule over all of Palestine. We can expect plenty more high drama in the Knesset and a lot of ink wasted drawing maps that have no bearing on "the facts on the ground," i.e. expanding settlements, Jewish-only bypass roads, and turning the remaining Bantustans into prisons.

The invasion of Iraq has already burned through so many justifications, from "an economic imperative" to "stopping naked aggression" to "enforcing the will of the United Nations" to "finding Weapons of Mass Destruction" to "defending human rights" and now finally, "bringing democracy to the Middle East." There are no excuses left. The Bush administration will try desperately to install yet another puppet regime in Iraq. If the occupation doesn’t fall apart before then, U.S. corporations will be fully entrenched in a year, but democracy won’t be. When you write the rules of the game, no one asks who wins. Even Stalin held elections.