Iraqi election cause for optimism

I felt compelled to respond to David Kleban’s overly pessimistic response to the Iraqi elections. He uses Hanna Arendt’s statement that democracy is “an environment that allows individuals to be participants in government” as a jumping off point to supposedly prove the illegitimacy and falsity of the entire electoral process in Iraq.

Fact: This election represents the first time the majority Shiites, minority Kurds and indeed the entire female population of Iraq has ever had an opportunity to be participants in the governing process. Discarding this hard fact and asserting that the millions of voters lining the streets unafraid of terrorist attacks were trying to fake the spirit of democracy so callously proves Kleban’s own bias.

He proceeds to prove his point that Iraqi democracy can never possibly work because citizens seemed to be voting based on “religious coalitions” as opposed to the candidates. Couldn’t a similar judgment be made about American democracy? Ask people what religious affiliation they have, how often they go to religious services and how strongly they feel about certain moral values and you can probably figure out how they voted in the last election. Just look at how the red-blue map of the United States looked on election night: Religious conservative areas of the country voted Republican, while more cosmopolitan areas that protest the religious overtones of the current administration voted Democratic.

Tens of millions of Americans vote on the basis of religious coalitions and the ideas represented by them. Finally, his assertion that that election may soon become a code-word for subjugation seems totally off the wall. Subjugation is what Iraq had when an extremely small number of men from a minority population held a complete monopoly on power and gassed their own citizens. I’d venture to say that the throngs of Iraqi voters lining the streets and potentially risking their own lives to vote would say that even a “superficial notion of democracy” is better than government by a genocidal dictator.

Matt Ericksen

Trinity ’05