This is what Bush calls a movement toward democracy:
The Power Beyond Their Grasp
By Vivienne Walt
Washington Post
Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page B01
BAGHDAD
Ali Hassan shook his head in dismay at the current state of his life. "Twenty-three years I worked in the Ministry of Justice," he said. "I was an accountant in the ministry's auditing department. Now where am I?
"Two weeks ago I sold our refrigerator and television just to get some money. I have four children at home," said the small, gray-haired man, standing among 300 or so demonstrators outside Baghdad's new Union of Unemployed Iraqis. "I'm happy Saddam is gone -- but I need a job."
And to whom did he and the other demonstrators turn? Chanting their demands for work, they marched toward Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace, headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- the almost all-American body, headed by L. Paul Bremer III, that runs Iraq. When I asked one of the organizers why they didn't go to their own leaders in the Iraqi Governing Council, he looked blank. "We don't know where they are," he said.
That's no surprise. One month after the council's 25 members were handpicked by Bremer's office, its members work in a largely empty office building, surrounded by American military cordons and coils of barbed wire. They carry American-issued MCI cell phones, with an American area code (914).
Almost all have spent the past few decades in exile, returning home only after Baghdad fell to coalition forces in April; to many of the people who stayed here through 23 years of Hussein's stranglehold, they might as well have landed from another planet. They are generally inaccessible, with no control over their own budget; more hands-on are the new council-appointed Iraqi cabinet ministers.
The United States has vowed to install a working democracy in Iraq, yet one of the defining values of any democracy is the extent to which it can furnish its citizens with what they need to survive. In Iraq today, these things are working utilities, jobs and safety. So far, the Governing Council can deliver none of these. That powerlessness, if it endures, could present serious obstacles to creating a viable Iraqi government that its citizens will respect.
-At least the Iraqis are organizing. I'd hate to see what Iraq would look like if they were
too cowed by years of Saddam and the sanctions to do anything.
