Passy,

Of course you are correct that the invasion of Iraq was never about democracy. However, the US propagandists uttered lofty phrases about democracy and reconstruction and then did precisely the opposite. As far as I can tell few opponents of the war pointed out this contradiction. Had this been done, I believe that Howard's case for our participation in that war would have unravelled far more rapidly than it eventually did and we would have most probably been spared the national disaster of his Government's re-election in 2004.

Instead they seemed to have bought the idea that Iraqis were inherently incapable of embracing democracy, or at least, only capable of religious sectarianism once the country had been militarily occupied, but as Naomi Klein writes on page 350 of "The Shock Doctrine":

... in February 2004, eleven months after the invasion of Iraq,
an Oxford Research international poll found that a majority of
Iraqis wanted a secular government: only 21% said their favoured
political system was an 'Islamic state'. ... Six months later ...
another poll found that 70% wanted Islamic law as the basis for
the state.

Klein disputes the prevailing view that the 'fiasco' of Iraq was the result of incompetence, rather it was "created by a careful and faithful application of the Chicago School ideology." (i.e. the same ideology espoused by Australian think tanks such as the CIS and the IPA and a few who have contributed to this very discussion).

The plans of the US centred upon the Iraqis being too disoriented to resist the plans to privatise their economy for the benefit of the likes of Bechtel and Halliburton and open it wide for foreign investment, however on page 361 Klein writes:

Instead, a great many Iraqis immediately demanded a say in the
transformation of the country. And it was the Bush administration's
response to this unexpected turn of events that generated the most
blowback of all.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

There were spontaneous elections in many parts of the country and "In many cases, US forces believing their President when he said the army had been sent to Iraq to spread democracy, played a facilitating role, helping to organise the election, even building ballot boxes."(p362)

However, Paul Bremer, realising that these would pose an obstacle to the plans of the US occupying authority, did not allow those elected a role in the administration of Iraq and cancelled its stated plans to convene a large constituent assembly.

When the constituent assembly was cancelled there should have been a huge outcry from across the globe. Had this been done, then the truth of what the US occupying authority was actually doing against the clear wishes of a democratic and secular majority of Iraqi public opinion would have been obvious to all.

To return to the original point of these posts about Iraq. The US could have "imposed democracy" upon Iraq if it had chosen to as Naomi Klein has shown.

Instead they chose to impose dictatorship so that US corporations could loot the assets of the Iraqi people as well as US taxpayer funds.

When opponents of the war carelessly repeat these sorts of catchphrases, it only serves to let off the hook the likes of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair and John Howard.

Daggett

I am not sure what point you are making about opponents of the war. There may have been/was a popular democratic uprising after the invasion which the US put down because they wanted their puppets in power to as you say loot the country.

In fact the US fears the democracy of thsoe it has "liberated"if it does not control it. (As an aside i think that was why in Japan after the war it brutally suppressed the strike movement and communist party.) In any event the desire to loot Iraq explains too why the US jailed the trade union and other leftist leaders as baathists and terrorists because it knew they had some sort of power to challenge their puppets.

I think we might be agreeing here.

Passy,

Of course, I am sure we largely are in agreement. Sorry for having given a different impression.

However, I believe that when phrases like "You cannot impose democracy from the outside" are used it has the unintended effect of helping to let the invaders of Iraq off the hook.

I believe this unwittingly propagates views of the likes of retired US Army officer Ralph Peters cited by Klein in "The Shock Doctrine"(p350):

Peters ... wrote in "USA Today" that "we did give the Iraqis a
unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy," but Iraqis "preferred
to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and
a culture of corruption. It appears that the cynics were right: Arab
societies can't support support democracy as we know it. And people
get the government they deserve. ... The violence staining Baghdad's
streets with gore isn't only a symptom of the Iraqi government's
incompetence, but of the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to
progress in any sphere of human endeavour. We are witnessing the
collapse of a civilisation." Though Peters was particularly blunt, many
Western observers have arrived at the same verdict: blame the Iraqis.

(Klein then goes on to convincingly refute this view.)

Because many critics of the war had, more or less, accepted Peters' view, I also naively accepted it, that is, until I recently read Klein's evidence to the contrary.

My point remains, that, contrary to Peters' assertion, the US occupying authority could have, had it wished, once it had overthrown Hussein's regime 'imposed' democracy, or, more accurately, allowed the Iraqis, themselves, to build democracy. Such an outcome may have only just justified the terrible cost of the invasion and made the case of war opponents seem wrong. However, I would hasten to add, as the likelihood of such an outcome was always low, I believe the stance of war opponents was still correct.

As Klein shows, they imposed dictatorship and not democracy so that US corporations could both ransack Iraq culminating in the privatisation of current efforts to privatise its oil wealth (http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org) and loot the US treasury.