 The Stain
of Democracy
Bill Bonner
The
Daily Reckoning
February 07, 2005
The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS:
The Bush Administration sees the citizens of Iraq as lost souls,
who just need something to believe in... so they bestowed on
them democracy - even if they don't understand what it is they
are voting for. Read on...
"If only I had been there
with my army... I would have taught those Jews a lesson."
Clovis, King of the Franks,
recently converted to Christianity... referring to the crucifixion
of Christ... and perhaps missing the point
Our beat, here at the Daily
Reckoning, is money. But there was never a dollar made outside
the great comedy of human life. For every seller there is a buyer...
and for every one of them there is a vast web of sticky connections
to everything else under heaven.
So we wander through the by-ways
of the public spectacle as if working our way around the bar
in a strip club... hoping to see things from a new and revealing
angle.
What catches our eye today
is the reports from the world's newest and most celebrated democracy
- Iraq. We have never been to Iraq and have no particular desire
to go. We have heard that it is hard to get a good drink and
few places to dance, like many places in Texas or Arkansas. But
if you were to listen to columnists such as Thomas L. Friedman
and David Brooks, both given space in the International Herald
Tribune, you might believe that the world is a much better place
today than it was last week. Progress has been made; the Iraqis
have voted, they say. Hallelujah.
Maybe it is true. But when
you move away from the real, discreet, visible, understandable
things of private life... it's hard to know. As things grow in
size and complexity... ignorance and delusion increase by the
square of the distance and the cube of the scale. A man may run
a small machine shop and have a good idea of what it is worth.
But put the company on the Big Board, and you will soon have
shareholders 4,000 miles away without a clue. And as the company
grows into a huge conglomerate, soon not even the CEO will know
what it is worth. He'll watch the share price along with everyone
else.
Likewise, there must be a million
frauds and misapprehensions separating the Christianity of the
Nazarene from the Catholic Church of the medieval and renaissance
eras. And between the democracy of ancient Greece or a New England
town meeting and the democracy of modern America or Iraq lay
a million scams and false impressions. In both cases, what is
lost in substance is replaced with rituals of solemn deceit.
A family might very well take
a vote on where to go on vacation. A nation might vote on which
flag it will fly over the capitol. In either case, people will
get what they want... peacefully, tolerably. Civilization will
be undisturbed.
But in Iraq, another form of
Evangelical democracy has been thrust upon the local bipeds.
On Sunday, they stood in line to vote for people they didn't
know, who would do things they knew not what, and - eventually
- put in place a government that, if it holds together, that
they probably will not particularly like. What the majority most
wants in Iraq, according to press reports, is for the United
States to leave. The locals, the Bush Administration has made
clear, will not make that decision,, no matter how many ballots
they cast. And if the government elected by the Iraqis turns
out to be disagreeable, as far as we can tell, the Bush Administration
reserves the right to make another regime change.
Voting is supposed to confer
legitimacy on the tyranny of the majority. But as democracy moves
from the town meeting to the national election, it gathers frauds
to it like conmen to insurance claims. So remote is actual power
and decision making that the voter no longer has any grasp of
it. After a while, not even the majority gets what it wants.
In America, for example, what majority wanted a government $55
trillion in the hole?
Like any public spectacle,
democracy, is full of the usual humbug. And Iraq's new democracy
seems to have more than usual. It was a "scam," said
an editorialist in the International Herald Tribune who seemed
to know what he was talking about. One of the largest tribes
- the Sunni -- boycotted it altogether. And those people who
did vote - according to press reports - often didn't know what
they were voting for. They thought they were electing a president
(even though no one campaigned for president and most of the
candidates on the ballot were completely unknown to voters.)
But so what? America has a
faith-based currency. Now it has a faith-based foreign policy
as well. We are in the modern age - the 21st century. Everything
has changed. Politics have replaced religion. Baghdad has replaced
Bethlehem. Humbug is all you can depend on.
When the Romans took Ctesphion,
near modern Baghdad, the venture seemed a great success. Thousands
of prisoners were taken, who were sold into slavery. The proceeds
went back to Rome.
When the Christians took Jerusalem,
again, the captives were sold into slavery. That, combined with
stealing everything that could be carried off, seemed to make
the venture - if not profitable, at least plausible.
America has found no similar
way to profit from its Eastern campaign. A few defense contractors,
and a handful of Texas oilmen, have made money on the deal. But
for the United States as a whole, the project has been a colossal
financial drain... with about price tag of about $4,000 per American
family so far.
But it would be a mean-spirited
Ebeneezer who would count the cost of such an uplifting campaign.
This is a Holy Crusade, after all. Fourteen hundred U.S. dead...
thousands more Iraqis... $200 billion... is any price too high
for the benefits of the ballot box? Our defenders of the faith
- George II and Tony I - have launched a crusade of sanctimonious
idolatry worthy of the Borgia popes. The Sodoms of anti-democratic
infidelity along the Tigris and Euphrates have been attacked...
and largely destroyed. "Insurgents," are regarded as
a cross between cannibals and the devil himself. They are "evil,"
says Brooks in The New York Times, no less. Had he lived in an
earlier era he might accuse them of sorcery.
Like any crusade, the War in
Iraq, has its rituals, its saints, its sacraments, its relics,
its holy writs and its holy martyrs.
Last Sunday, Iraqis stood in
line to take the sacrament. Instead of marking their foreheads
with ashes, as Christians will do next Wednesday, they dipped
their fingers in blue ink - as proof that they had come to the
holy place and been sanctified. Whatever sins they had committed
in that benighted era before the U.S. invasion were cast out.
Now they were democrats, solemnly marking their sacred ballots
with the sign of the cross.
Thus, the Mesopotamian tribes
have been delivered from evil... at least for now.
Elections are hardly new to
the Middle East. There was one in Palestine in 1996. In 2000,
Egyptians went to the polls. Iranians voted in 2001 and Pakistanis
voted in 2002. As it was convenient, the American government
recognized the victors... or ignored them. Of course, not too
many years ago, it also supported its key men in the region -
Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden, neither of whose names appeared
on the ballot on Sunday.
The nice thing about elections
is that they represent a sort of imperfect progress. Political
regimes are voted in and voted out. They are not necessarily
any better than those chosen by other means - but at least the
regime change is achieved without violence. That is the progress
of politics of the last three centuries: force is replaced by
fraud.
But in bringing democracy to
Iraq at the point of a gun, the Bush Administration seems to
have missed the point. Voting is merely the form of a civilized
society, not the substance of it. Democracy may be a good thing
- but only to the extent it actually compliments the charms of
civilized life. It sits on a civilized society like a hat on
a pretty girl. It may not be very elegant, but it is generally
tolerable. But force the hat on the head of an Islamic fundamentalist
... and the whole exercise seems pointless, costly and ridiculous.
But the big day seems to have
turned out better than expected. A few people died horrible deaths
- but even they were martyrs to the cause of democracy.
"Salim Yacoubi bent over
to kiss the purple ink stain on his twin brother's right index
finger, gone cold with death," reports the International
Herald Tribune.
"'You can see the finger
with which he voted,' a friend volunteered, as he cast his tearful
gaze on the corpse, sprawled across a body washer's concrete
slab. 'He's a martyr now.'"
"The stain marked the
day the man... exercised his right to a free vote, and the day
he paid for that hard-won privilege, with his life."
A neighbor reflected on what
Election Day had meant for Iraq:
"We were waiting impatiently
for this day so we could finally rid ourselves of all our troubles."
We assume he exaggerated; even
the Holy Eucharist promises less.
And now, the orthodoxy of modern
democratic faith has been delivered to the Iraqis. The heathens
have been converted. They may now save their souls any time they
want - simply by dipping their fingers in blue ink and voting.
The holy sacraments have been
given.
Saecula saeculorum.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
 The Daily Reckoning
Editor's Note:
Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning.
He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street
Journal best seller Financial
Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley &
Sons).
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