As the neocon designs for a secular, decadent Iraqi government collapse, Iraq’s most important cleric insists that the new “democracy" be based on (horrors!) – direct elections!
The American missionaries of neocon democracy are shocked, SHOCKED! that the future Iraqi government might be governed by (shudder!) – the majority!
Of course, von Rumsfeld had already forbidden any religious government in Iraq, so the neocons have been scurrying to find enough Iraqi atheists to staff a new colonial government. No one in the Pentagon was prepared, it appears, for the quaint, outmoded notion that a “democratic” Iraqi government might actually represent the Iraqis.
“Neocon Politics 101,” written by Jean Jacques Rousseau over 200 years ago (with later editions edited by Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Strauss), can easily be applied to modern-day Iraq, as follows:
The gratitude of the Iraqi people, as demonstrated by their inability to topple Saddam’s statue last April without the help of an American tank, represents a “social contract” that delivers to the U.S. government and its occupying army all legitimacy and right to name, or to act as, the “representatives” of the Iraqi people. If the people resist, of course, they must be “forced to be free” – something that Richer and the String of Perles will no doubt attempt to accomplish immediately after November, 2004, with our money and risking someone else’s sons and daughters.
What heresy that Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim should insist that “the people should have a basic role in issues concerning the destiny of their country." Where did he ever get that idea – the Declaration of Independence?