Seven weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, a special elections court disqualified a winning parliamentary candidate, likely reversing the narrow defeat of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s coalition and possibly allowing him the first chance to form a new coalition government.

The court disqualified the candidate on charges he was a loyalist of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and left open the possibility or barring still more.

The court’s decisions, if upheld on appeal, would erase the two-seat victory by a largely secular coalition led by Ayad Allawi, a Shiite who served as an interim prime minister after the American overthrow of Mr. Hussein.

Like they say, if at first you don’t succeed…

What I find really puzzling is Iraqi election math. For instance, how does disqualifying one winning candidate erase a two-seat margin?

Then there’s this:

The court also disqualified 51 other losing candidates and the votes they received will be discarded, requiring a recalculation of the winners – and losers – across the ballot. Under Iraq’s tortuous and untested election laws, that could cost Mr. Allawi’s bloc a second seat, while awarding seats to Mr. Maliki or other parties, officials said.

I’m no expert on local eccentricities in democracy across the world, but I would venture a guess that there are very few democracies where disqualifying losing candidates can have the effect of reversing election results. Under what conceivable set of rules could disqualifying losing candidates (and the votes they received) require a recalculation of who’s the winner? If you disqualify a losing candidate and nullify his votes, doesn’t the vote count of the remaining candidates remain unchanged? Whoever won before is still the winner?

The funny thing is that neither the NYT nor Steven Lee Myers, who wrote the piece, find anything puzzling in the two passages I’ve quoted. They offer no explanation of any kind, for either statement. They don’t even seem to realize that any explanation is called for.

So, in all fairness, the statement “Isn’t democracy wonderful!” should be balanced by the statement “Isn’t journalism wonderful!”

(2)
I have not yet found a clear exposition anywhere, but my current hypothesis — based on much reading between the lines of articles written by wily journalists who know better than to give too much away lest they actually inform the public — is as follows:

• The Iraqi elections don’t seem to operate as a bunch of separate contests for individual seats.
• There seems to be some notion of taking the aggregate vote count of each party and allocating them seats based on the aggregate number of votes they received.
• The candidates of each party are ranked by the number of votes they received.
• Then, if a party is allocated ten seats, the first ten candidates on its list are deemed to be elected.
• So when a bunch of candidates are disqualified, and their votes nullified, the number of of seats allocated to a given party may or may not change.
• If it doesn’t change, but two of its candidates were disqualified, then the next two candidates on its list are deemed to be elected.

(Here’s the article I found that came closest to expressing some of this.)

I find it truly mindboggling that the NYT would publish the article they did without providing any kind of explanation at all of this unique and unfamiliar election system.

President Bush, on Wednesday afternoon, addressing the ongoing fighting between government forces and Shi’ite militants in Basra and Sadr City:

Bush: My first reaction to watching the Iraqi government respond forcefully and to make it abundantly clear that — I think the exact — I can’t remember the exact words of the Prime Minister, but “criminal elements” I know were a part of his declaration — would be dealt with. I thought that was a very positive moment in the development of a sovereign nation, that is willing to take on elements that are — you know, that believe they’re beyond the law.

Could there be a more egregious example of the pot calling the kettle black?

It’s hard to imagine that any politician could be so blissfully unaware of how he is regarded by not just his critics, but a majority of his electorate. In the American consciousness, George Bush has arguably come to displace Richard Nixon as the president who most arrogantly exemplifies the belief that he is above the law and answerable to nobody.

Have to hand George one thing, though: it would indeed have been a very positive moment in the development of this sovereign nation if Pelosi and Reid had managed to find the backbone to hold Bush to account for shredding our civil liberties, and riding roughshod over the Constitution and the laws of the land.

(2) Wrong Again, Naturally

On Wednesday, President Bush also stressed another positive developmental aspect of the ongoing fighting between government forces and Shi’ite militants in Basra and Sadr City:

And secondly, we are helping, but it’s important to know that the Iraqis are in the lead. This is a positive moment in the development of a nation that can govern itself and defend itself and sustain itself. We will provide oversight and, on occasion, support when asked. This is an Iraqi operation.

And this morning, the WP has a story with the sub-heading “Americans Appear To Take the Lead As Iraqi Units Wait”:

U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.

(3) George Bush Versus Reality

Still the WP:

As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to “normalcy,” administration officials in Washington held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country.

(4) On The Positive Side

What appears to Western eyes as armed conflict may just be electioneering, Iraqi-style. Evidently, they prefer to practice a slightly different form of democracy from what we tried to export:

Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials. With little U.S. presence in the south, and British forces in Basra confined to an air base outside the city, one administration official said that “we can’t quite decipher” what is going on.
[...]
In Basra, three rival Shiite groups have been trying to position themselves, sometimes through force of arms, to dominate recently approved provincial elections.

The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups — the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq’s largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor’s seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.

Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing “the first salvo in upcoming elections,” the administration official said.

“His dog in that fight is that he is basically allied with the Badr Corps” against forces loyal to Sadr, the official said. “It’s not a pretty picture.”

Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush‘s domestic wiretapping program Wednesday, endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the controversial surveillance legal status.

Under pressure from the Bush administration for quick action, the full Senate could take up the measure next week.
[…]
Republicans defeated several Democratic amendments, including measures to insert a one-year expiration date into the bill and require the National Security Agency to report more often to Congress on the standards for its domestic surveillance program.

It’s not true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And of all the things that sensible Americans should fear today, I have to put the government of George W. Bush slightly above al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda, after one heinous attack, seems to have retired from the business of attacking America. The only attacks Osama bin Laden has launched on us in the last five years have been by videotape. (Okay, audiotape too.)* This may be partly because our government has done such a great job of using al-Qaeda to keep us permanently in a high-pitched state of terror. As long as the Bush regime does Osama’s job for him, Osama doesn’t need to do much more than remind us from time to time that he’s still alive and kicking, and al-Qaeda has its tentacles everywhere.

So, at least until we have regime change in the U.S., and we are able to install a government with a more rational, more honest approach to the problem of terrorism, al-Qaeda would seem to be more of a potential threat, and not very imminent either.

Whereas the Bush administration is an actual, ongoing threat to the American people. It is hard at work every day, surreptitiously (and not so surreptitiously) battering down our civil liberties, eating away at our two hundred year old system of checks and balances like a cancer, trampling the constitution and then crapping on it for good measure, usurping more and more power, pushing us ever closer to becoming a police state where either you are sheeple or you are an enemy of the people. (And let’s not kid ourselves that we know the half of it yet.)

It has (proudly) used the tools of despotic regimes through the ages—spying on its own citizens, torturing its enemies, lying to its citizens, casually repudiating universal conventions of human rights and the laws of war. It is well on their way to achieving what anyone would have considered impossible six years ago—the reincarnation of McCarthyism. Thanks to this administration – as Keith Olbermann suggested in his rightly famous smackdown of Dick Cheney on August 30, and as I’ve been saying for a little longer than that – fascism is not just a history-book term any more for young Americans. America does indeed confront a grave fascist threat, from within.

Americans — no matter who they are, no matter how rich or how poor, or where they live or where they work, or whether they work, or what the nature of their work — face a simple choice. Either you can oppose this fascist threat, and by opposing, hope to end it (yes, that was a hat tip to old W.S.’s whether ‘tis nobler in the mind…). Or you can, explicitly or implicitly, become part of the threat. Keeping silent is just tacit acquiescence. According to the polls, a large majority of Americans disapprove wholeheartedly of the fascist turn of events in this country, and are determined to signal their opposition to this threat.

Somehow, the majority of Republicans in Congress – sadly out of touch with their constituents, sadly out of touch with what they (presumably) once proudly espoused as their values – are determined to see lending a willing shoulder to the fascist wagon as an honorable act of loyalty. In doing so, they dishonor the meaning of both those words, honorable and loyalty. They dishonor the whole concept of public service. Their loyalty should be not to the party, not to the dictator-in-president’s-clothing, but to their constituents, to the constitution. I don’t know what is sadder—that we have Senators and Congressmen who need to be reminded of that, or that even reminding them isn’t going to make a damn difference to their behavior. They are so deeply in thrall to the political machine that at this point they can only helplessly watch themselves goose-step along, just lemmings in jackboots.

In my book, the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee stands guilty of this most contemptible form of appeasement. All the more contemptible because they are the ones we charged to protect us from such threats, they are the repositories of the public trust. And I use the word appeasement not because everyone is trotting it out since Donald Rumsfeld put it in play, I use it because it actually fits perfectly. Republicans defended voting to approve the domestic-wiretap-approval bill by this charming argument:

But Republicans countered that the bill represented the best deal on the matter and should not be amended.

Wasn’t that precisely the argument Neville Chamberlain made about Hitler? That the Munich agreement represented the best possible deal for Britain?

How come we don’t negotiate with terrorists, and we don’t negotiate with evil countries like North Korea or Iran, but the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee cheerfully negotiate away our basic civil liberties to the evil regime of our very own Dear Leader, with the justification that we have to give him a foot or so, otherwise he’ll just grab a yard?

Sen. Arlen Specter is selling the White House “supported” bill that he has lent his name to as “a way to have judicial review” of the warrantless wiretapping program. Except that the bill does not mandate such a review. President Bush has agreed (does anyone have it in writing?) to submit the program to a secret review by the FISA court, if Congress passes the bill exactly as ghost-written, without amendments. But anyone who believes that what we think the President is promising and what he will later claim to have promised are one and the same shouldn’t be wandering around Capitol Hill unsupervised, let alone casting votes on the Senate floor.

One thing I would dearly love to know from Sen. Specter. If he supports “his” bill pretty much only because it offers a shot at judicial review, then will he vote against the bill if any amendment is passed?

* I am often much more serious than I may appear to be. For example, here’s Media Matters discussing Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine:

Suskind noted how the Madrid train bombing in March 2004 “was further affirmation of what CIA analysts had first begun to see in sigint [signals intelligence] and limited humint [human intelligence] as far back as the spring of 2002: a possible strategic shift by al Qaeda away from further attacks on the U.S. mainland.”

Funny, isn’t it, how Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Negroponte somehow totally forget to tell anyone about this intelligence? You are laughing, right?

Assuming that this prediction holds true, prepare yourself for yet another round of self-congratulatory back slapping from the pro-war types. Iraq has a constitution, just like us! Freedom is on the march! In your face, nonbelievers!

You might remember that we heard a similar line of comment back in early February, right after Iraq had its last election. But the corner we turned only placed us on the very same path we were on before—the violence continued unabated, with nearly 600 American soldiers and untold numbers of Iraqis killed since the paint wore off the index fingers of President Bush’s fanbase. While it would be comforting to think that the constitution will start paying dividends in reducing violence and moving Iraq back from the brink of an all-out civil war, too many signs are pointing to more of the same.

For one thing, even some of the peaceniks inside Bush’s own administration are having second thoughts about the power of democracy to quell a festering insurgency:

Over time, President Bush told troops at Fort Bragg, N.C., this spring, “the terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning that region into a base for attacks on America and our allies around the world.”

But inside the administration, that belief provides less solace than it once did. Senior officials say the intelligence reports flowing over their desks in recent months argue that even if democratic institutions take hold, the insurgency may strengthen. And that possibility has created a quandary for an administration that desperately wants to equate democracy-building with winning the war, but so far has not been able to match the two.

and…

“There’s always the question of whether we give these guys more credibility by directly addressing their arguments,” one of Mr. Bush’s most senior aides said recently. “But the president was concerned that we hadn’t described Iraq to the American people for what it is – a struggle of ideologies that isn’t going to end with one election, or one constitution, or even a string of elections.”

The president was concerned about that? Really? That’s a quite the turnaround from his usual cheerleading about Iraq’s progress. When Washington finally starts sending out feelers that the war in Iraq will continue past any number of supposed milestones, then there’s real cause to worry that the pooch has been well and truly screwed.

But if the road toward peace, freedom and democracy is a long one, the ratification of this new constitution should be an important step, right? In theory, yes. But in practice, the Iraqi constitution doesn’t do much to calm down the disaffected Sunni muslims who make up the bulk of the insurgency. The reports coming out of Iraq describe a large Sunni voter turnout against the constitution, so its predicted passage certainly isn’t going to make them feel any more empowered or any less angry. It’s also helpful to remember that the vote itself only came about when the majority coalition of Kurds and Shiites comprimised to make the document more palatable to Sunnis in Iraq’s legislature:

A last-minute deal last week on the constitution — allowing it to be amended in the next year, rather than eight years as originally anticipated — is also designed to encourage Sunni Arabs to become more involved and reject the insurgency. The constitution was largely drafted to reflect the interests of the Kurdish and Shiite groups that dominate the assembly, including carving out distinct ethnically based territories with greater control over oil wealth.

Of course, there’s nothing that says that this agreement to amend the constitution will hold, and considering the tensions involved between the majority and minority groups in Iraq, it’s not difficult to imagine that the groups in power will somehow derail the amendment process. And even if things go exactly as planned—which they probably won’t—it’s hard to imagine what incentive insurgents will have to ratchet down their attacks, especially in the next year.

Some people will be happy to tell you how much of a step forward this new Iraqi constitution is. I would love to be able to agree with them, since a stable and democratic Iraq is in everyone’s best interests. But beyond the cheerleading and potential finger painting (which will surely be forthcoming), the post-constitution Iraq looks like it will be pretty much the same as the pre-constitution one. As that unnamed senior Bush aide said, this isn’t going to end with one election, or one constitution, or even a string of elections.

Don’t you wish someone would have brought this up in 2002?

Poll: Iraqi elections give Bush boost:

Between January 14 and 16, 51 percent of survey participants expressed approval of Bush’s performance as president. But 57 percent of the surveyed Friday through Sunday stated that they approved of how the he does his job.

After careful demographic, psychological and political analysis, 1115.org has arrived at the conclusion that the six percent rise in the President’s approval rating is directly attributable to people getting a chance to relive their kindergarden years by finger-painting.

You know, that fist-shaped country that had a “free” election just a few months ago.

Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential election has passed off peacefully, but ended in controversy as opposition candidates called for a boycott…The move followed claims of voting irregularities. The dispute centres on the supposedly indelible ink that had been dabbed on to voters’ thumbs to show they voted…Many voters were able to wipe the ink off.

Let’s hope ink is the only common factor. Any more similarities might be too much to handle:

In a report issued late last month, the International Monetary Fund said it regrets “indications that widespread corruption, the rise in drug activities and the lack of transparency in many areas may have undermined the business environment.” The IMF was particularly concerned about Afghanistan’s resurgence in opium farming, making the country once again the world’s leading producer of the raw ingredient for heroin. Three years after U.S. forces arrived, Afghanistan is now responsible for about 87 percent of the world’s opium supply, officials estimate.

Military expenditures total $1 billion each month in Afghanistan. Soldiers still suffer casualties, and some still die. I wish I could forget about that as easily as the Fingerpainters have.

In the days following the Iraqi election, a lot of people out there decided to show their solidarity with the voters of Iraq by putting blue ink on their index finger. A fairly harmless gesture, though it could probably be argued that many of the people inking up their fingers do it in support of George Bush’s Iraq policy rather than the country itself. In case you missed it, the fact that Iraq had an election wipes the slate entirely clean of missing WMD’s, bad intelligence, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and more than 1,400 US servicemen and women killed…so stop your complaining.

The Iraq elections created some great pictures and inspiring stories. And it’s a big deal to a people that have lived under the thumb of dictatorship for so many years. But it is only one step toward the goal of a stable country, not a stunt to make warbloggers feel better about invading a country that was not a threat to our security, had tenuous ties to Al Qaeda (at best), and was not responsible for the horrors of 9/11. But it’s funny how so many conservatives didn’t give a damn about Iraqis and their civilian casualties in the months leading up to the elections, treating any mention of the subject as somehow subversive and traitorous. And I have to wonder how many of the right-wing nutjobs who took a “let’s just nuke Iraq and get it over with” attitude are now proudly waving around blue fingers in support of people they recently wanted to bomb off the face of the Earth.

And another question for our ink-stained conservative friends: will you be so supportive of the Iraqi voters once they elect a government that doesn’t have America’s interests at heart? Early reports indicate that the party headed by top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has taken a lead over its more-secular rivals. If this trend holds through the final results, Iraq could very well wind up with a government more aligned with future battlefield Iran than the good ol’ US of A.

Once that happens, people can go back to bitching about the Iraqis. Perhaps the ink will have washed off by then.

Fight the power:

KRAMER (to organizer at AIDS Walk desk): Uh, Cosmo Kramer?

ORGANIZER: Uh…o.k., you’re checked in. Here’s your AIDS ribbon.

KRAMER: Uh, no thanks.

ORGANIZER: You don’t want to wear an AIDS ribbon?

KRAMER: No.

ORGANIZER: But you have to wear an AIDS ribbon.

KRAMER: I have to?

ORGANIZER: Yes.

KRAMER: See, that’s why I don’t want to.

ORGANIZER: But everyone wears the ribbon. You must wear the ribbon!

KRAMER: You know what you are? You’re a ribbon bully.

Pretenders:

If these chickenhawks wanted to emulate voters, they should have spent a few hours in line outside the chamber only to take their seats at the very end of the speech.