That was the good news

“50% of the required votes to win a seat”

That would seem to largely depend on the district magnitude, no? My vague recollection is that the system in use is a proportional representation system with one nationwide district, so the deposit forfeiture threshold would be fairly small. This AEI article says there are 275 seats, so the forfeiture threshold is 1/550 or just below 0.2% of the national vote. And, (I believe) isn’t on a per-seat basis, so a party can qualify a 275-person list for 7.5 million dinars; qualifying a slate for the Australian Commons in every constituency would cost a pretty penny more than A$350, I’d imagine, although I suspect most any serious party would get most, if not all, of its money back eventually.

The deposit (according to UNIDO, more like US $1700 for an individual or US $5100 for a party) does seem high, however. Mind you, the qualifying fee for candidates for president to qualify electors in Mississippi is $300, although I’ve seen higher–I seem to recall it cost $3500 to get on the ballot during the California recall, although there was a significant discount if you got a lot of signatures–and in the U.S. you don’t get your money back even if you do win, as the qualifying fee is used to (slightly) help pay for the primary or the general election.

All that said, I’m not a huge fan of Israeli-style low-threshold, single national district PR, but for a short-term constituent assembly (which is what this election is for) rather than a long-term government it might be a good idea.

James, I think it probably means that if there are violations of the registration procedures that cost extra money in terms of extra burocracy and papers and work etc. to process and resubmit, that money will be paid by the registering entity. bills = expenses.

In comparison, I wonder how free the Japanese and German elections were right after WWII? How about South Korea? Something tells me that those first elections were more than rigged in favor of the US’s golden chosen. Hmmm, I wonder how well that worked out for us…

But I guess that was a long time ago and things are sooooooo much more different now. Now the world is so much smarter and freshly freed people are always instantly able to run a Democracy. I know there is a lot of thought that it takes some special circumstances for a Democracy to work, but Iraq is so far past those points it isn’t even worth discussing.

When you are old and grey and if there is an Iraq that looks something like Turkey or maybe even S. Korea, realize you were on the wrong side. And your’s was a voice that mocked every bit of progress and mistake equally.

But I guess that was a long time ago and things are sooooooo much more different now.

Right on two counts, Jet! For readers who were unaware, the point that Jet is trying to make here is that Second World War ended 49 years ago, and Germany and Japan were developed industrial states.

The individual case is not important in this kind of elections. About no-one would enter as an individual.

If you get too little votes you’ll end up without a seat, but more importantly, if you’ll get more votes than neccesary for one seat, those votes will be useless.

You’re supposed to create a political party, with members, who select candidates and campaign across the whole country.

And if your political party is viable you’ll win one or more seats filled by candidates from your list.

Now the PUK wouldn’t need much campaigning in Basra, but in say Kirkuk proportional representation has clear advantages over a winner takes all style election.

y81, why don’t you go and find out and tell us something interesting if you think it makes a difference.

FWIW it doesn’t seem to be a problem in Bosnia but it wasn’t a one party state before the war and it didn’t have the same kind of appointee government to skew things at the start. Likewise there was a political structure and struggle among the Poles throughout the 1980s and they have set things up to their own satisfation wih little external interference. I can’t really see how Poland is more relevant than Greece, Portugal, Argentina or even the good old USA.

Do you think we should leave this kind of issue to the election mechanics policy elite? Or do you think widespread understanding of electoral processes is of fundamental importance in the democratic process?

Actually I think that we should not consider y81’s point until the experts in expertise have made an adjudication on the necessary expertise for a discussion on electoral mechanics. Unfortunately I am having trouble locating the experts in the selection of those experts and am therefore going home to lie down for a bit.

dsquared,
What about Taiwan and S. Korea? They certainly weren’t industrialized. And I’m not sure the level of industrialization is more pertinent than the level of education. And 2004 Iraq is certainly better educated than 1945 Japan. So you say industrialization, I say education. Either way, the only truly successful democracies, created from outside, are ones the US led there through the nose.

So if the US is meddling and gaming Iraqi Democracy, while it may be morally repugnant to preach democracy to a people while pulling their strings, it is still in everyone’s best interest. And if forcing Iraq into a western style democracy is what it takes to create progress in the ME, then game on. Besides, with the US meddling, the US will be held accountable for Iraqi corruption. Surely a major bonus to middle/working class Iraq.

I wouldn’t have gone to war with Iraq, but now that we are there silly things like scruples shouldn’t keep us from repeating past successful performances. And even if you don’t agree, I know Machiavelli would :P

I can’t wait for Colin Powell’s book and his treatise on what he would have done differently in Iraq.

On one hand, the $5100 for a party seems large compared to the income of one single Iraqi.

On the other hand, if one were to make the requirement 10,000 signatures on a petition, it wouldn’t seem wacky at all to me. The monetary requirement is only $0.5 per petition signer.

I guess, if you squint really hard, you might be able to rationalize making it cash rather than signatures because cash is harder to fake? But obviously it biases the system away from parties who don’t have rich members.

Obviously (at least to me), there needs to be some measure to make sure there aren’t 200 parties on the ballot.

But rationing access by money sounds like something an economist with no emotional or political intelligence would propose. Much like the internal CIA ‘stockmarket’ for terrorism, good arguments can be given.

But it just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Roger,

Could you point me at the poll showing Sadr as equally popular as Allawi. The latest IRI poll shows Allawi with an approval rating of 45% which in the past has ranged to 65%. If you can show me the IRI poll showing Sadr with even a 10% approval rating, I’ll vote Democrat. Every poll I looked at did not mention Sadr, but did show questions being answered that would leave you with the impression that Sadr is about as popular as a dog turd at a wedding.

IRI poll showing Sadr with high approval. Thanks for your vote, jet.

Jet,

For reasons mentioned on the Barroso thread, I want you to vote Bush. If I provide you with the evidence first (Anon has screwed up the link), will you vote for him?

If you are in a swing state I may even point you to some information on Iraqi literacy levels.

Ah, but the relevant slide isn’t up on the IRI site! So Jet doesn’t know it exists! And the WaPo is libruhl mainstream media.

Vote Bush, Jet. You know you want to.

abb1, I would change that perfect scenario slightly – in the next election… Iraq gets Diebold voting machines. That’s when democracy will be really complete.

An imperfect democracy would be better than Saddam, both for Iraqis and for the world. And sure, it’s possible that whoever is elected will proceed to consolidate power and move even further from real democracy — like, say Musharraf in Pakistan. That would STILL be better than Saddam.

Without descending to sarcasm or bad bets, let me voice support for what I think was jet’s original sentiment: that if the Iraqi elections do come off in January with a minimum of bloodshed, no matter how flawed they may be by “western” standards, can we agree that that would be progress?

Even if so, the question of whether it was “worth it” is still legitimate. But before you answer, compare the results in Iraq with other places — and you don’t have to look all the way back to Germany and Japan. Five years after the NATO campaign to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, that statelet is still essentially a ward of the international community, an occupied territory riven with ethnic tension and organized crime. And as this past weekend’s election showed, Kosovo is still pretty far from a percectly functioning democracy. So was Kosovo “worth it”?

(Incidentally, I’d even venture to state that Afghanistan may be closer to actual democracy than Kosovo is; the Afghans, at least, stuck with the process even if they knew their party wasn’t going to win.)

George,

I’ve never understood the logic of saying that because getting rid of Saddam Hussein was good (which I’d accept), the agents which got rid of Saddam Hussein are good (which I don’t accept). I would imagine that if the black plague swept away Saddam and his two psycho boyos, that would be good — but it wouldn’t make the plague good. When Mobuto was forced from his palace in Zaire, it was a definite good for humanity — even though the man that did it was, in turn, your usual killer/dictator.

The occupation has been premised on the idea that the U.S. is a force for good, and so its interests must be a force for good. Surely the U.S. has acted as a force for good in its history now and then; but its raison d’etre is not to exist, Platonically, as one of the virtues in heaven, but to exist among the fallen, as a country, with interests that are sometimes coordinate, sometimes inimical, to other countries, and a history of invasions that is spotty and, now and then, criminal (see the history of the U.S. and Guatamala for the latter). The devolution from liberator to occupier happened pretty quickly. Was it the attempt to privatize Iraq’s economy, or the attempt to postpone any Iraqi election until the country was pacified (the latter plan being thwarted by Sistani)? Who knows. However, it happened, and now the U.S. must either bear the brunt of a real election, which will express the Iraqi feeling about it, or try to circumvent that election, by screwing with who can run and screwing with the election process.

So: what do you think the U.S. should do?

An imperfect democracy would be better than Saddam, both for Iraqis and for the world.

It is not at all clear to me that this is true. The situation in Fallujah suggests to me that what we are headed for in Iraq is an Israeli-style democracy; a broadly legimate democratic state, but with a minority of about a million people who are not represented in that democracy, who do not regard it as legitimate and who can only be kept under control by attacking them with helicopter gunships.

Democracies of this kind work, and they are better than totalitarian states like Saddam’s Iraq, but one thing we do know from the last ten years is that states of this kind breed terrorists at a frightening rate.

Roger: I like a poster who can cut through the chaff.

I think your assertion that “The occupation has been premised on the idea that the U.S. is a force for good” is not just an oversimplification but a misrepresentation. There were several overlapping motivations for the war, which I will not attempt to outline here. (And anyway, they never seem to convince anyone who’s not already convinced.)

If I had to condense it all down into one pithy assertion, I would not use terms like good and evil (that’s Bush’s job) but I would say that the object of the war was to exchange one set of risks and potential benefits for another, better set of risks and potential benefits. So for the war to be considered a success over the intermediate- to long-term, the resulting Iraqi society does not necessarily have to be “good” in an absolute sense (ie, to the level where it might join the EU or something like that) but only that it be better than Saddam’s Iraq — better for the Iraqis, better for the Arab world, better for the larger world.

I think there is every reason to be optimistic that that will eventually be the case. Some might say that that is already the case, although even an optimist like me cannot have complete confidence about the long-term outcome. But even knowing everything we now know that we didn’t know in March 2003, I’d still take the long-term risks as they stand now over the long-term risks of not having invaded.

To your specific question about what I think the US should do: I think the US and the Coalition should work to eliminate the ability of factions in Iraq to attain power through violence. They took a great step toward this goal by working closely (albeit quite delicately) with Sistani to dislodge Sadr’s ragtag militia from the religious centers in the south. Sistani is no angel, but he holds his influence legitimately, by force of personality and religion, rather than by force of arms — and he is a resolute supporter of elections.

The next big step in this regard will come with the assault on Fallujah. I don’t pretend to know what precise measure of military attack versus co-optation would yield the best result, and when, but I do know that allowing the insurgents in Fallujah to remain unmolested would undermine the legitimacy of any Iraqi government — and would encourage others to do the same. That’s why the US will attack.

The overall goal is to demonstrate that the best way for any particular group to advance their interests is nonviolent participation in the democratic process. That’s the basic self-interest dynamic that maintains any civil society. The initial results in Iraq will probably be a messy, dirty tribal politics that makes the current US race look like a tea party, but so what? That would be progress.

dsquared: as you note, an Israeli-style armed democracy is still way better than an Arab-style despotism, which is how many or most Arab states (including Saddam’s Iraq) keep their minorities under control.

I hope that it does not turn out that despotism is the only viable form of government for Arabs. There’s no shortage of evidence for that theory, but I’m stubbornly hopeful about the ability of Arabs to come up with some better mode of governing themselves. If not, we’re all in for much worse than this little dust-up.

George,

I’m glad you don’t identify the Platonically Good and the U.S. That means we can calmly discuss, and disagree on, the Good, American interest, and Iraq’s interest without yelling. It is quite liberating.

So: here is why I think it is neither good, nor in Iraq’s interest, nor in the U.S.’s interest to attack Fallujah with the violence that you advocate.

The reason, we are told, that Fallujah must be “retaken” is that we need to hold elections in Iraq. We need to hold elections in Iraq to create a legitimate government. We need a legitimate government, from the U.S. point of view, in order to collaborate with Iraq to promote America’s security interests in the region – and from the Iraqi point of view, to restore normality and dignity to everyday life. So far, so good.

Is the path to those goals through a violent attack on Fallujah? I think not. I think such an attack will further alienate the Iraqi population. This in turn will make more extremely anti-American political parties popular, and sink the popularity of those factions seen as close to the U.S. This in turn will incline the Americans to find ways to finesse the elections in order to elevate our collaborators. Which will lead to a deepening, rather than a lessening, of the crisis of legitimacy in Iraq. Which will be productive of more violence against the Americans and their associates in the country. And so it will go in a downward spiral.

In America, any politician worth his salt can win votes by promising to be tough on crime. But he will quickly lose votes if his toughness on crime consists in bombing selected high crime cities. . The idea that America is going to win friends and influence people in the Sunni triangle by killing x amount of them seems, to me, like a pretty crazy plan. When it was tried, last April, it nearly destroyed the Iraqi Governing Council, and certainly speeded up their dissolution. Allawi knows this. So why should he be pressing for the sacking of Fallujah? Perhaps because Allawi doesn’t want power from the ballot box – making himself electorally unpopular, while at the same time making himself indispensable to the Americans, opens up another, and quite sinister, avenue for retaining power. In this, Allawi’s interests are almost parallel to the insurgents.

dsquared: as you note, an Israeli-style armed democracy is still way better than an Arab-style despotism, which is how many or most Arab states (including Saddam’s Iraq) keep their minorities under control.

No, I said it’s better than Saddam’s Iraq. And in the specific case of Israel, it takes place in the context of a first-world economy, which nobody is seriously suggesting Iraq would have. Furthermore, for people who don’t live in Iraq, the main issue is the effect of the political system there on terrorist production and recruitment. And as I say, one thing we do know about “armed democracies” (I would call them democracies with internal colonies) is that they breed terrorists like flies.

John Q: actually there was opposition in the US to the Afghan war: protests, vigils, marches etc. And while it’s true that this was mostly at the fringe, and far less than opposition to the Iraq war, it was still (to my imperfect recollection) much more opposition than the Kosovo war inspired in the American public. Very few street protests that I recall about the NATO campaign in Kosovo.

But that’s not really what I meant, nor you, I think. The Afghan war was as cut-and-dried as a modern war could be: the Taliban was sheltering the people who were responsible for a massive attack on American soil. Who besides the extreme anti-war fringe could oppose that? Whereas the justifications for the Iraq war were more abstact and subject to debate — much like, in fact, the justifications for the Kosovo campaign. Yet opposition to the Iraq war coalesced around that core of semipro protesters in a way that nevered happened over Kosovo. Moreover, this phenomenon holds in the particular as well as the aggregate: I know many people who are vitriolically opposed to the Iraq war but voice(d) support for the Kosovo campaign. That’s hypocrisy, and it’s widespread.

dsquared: sorry, didn’t mean to put words in your mouth.

But I will say it: how Israel treats its citizens, including its Palestinian citizens, is better than how most Arab nations treat most of their citizens — let alone unfavored minorities.

But I think you may have been trying to compare the insurgents in Fallujah with the Palestinians in the occupied territories — since that’s where most of the terrorists come from, not from the Arabs who live in Israel. If that’s the comparison you’re making, I think it’s a flawed one. For one thing, it is not at all clear to me that the difficulties of non-Israeli Palestinians stem more from mistreatment by Israel or from mistreatment by other Arabs (particularly their own avaricious leaders).

Having said that, I don’t really want to get into a discussion of the Arab-Israeli question. That would take all day.