Democracy truly denied in Iraq?

Long-time JWN readers probably recall how much I hoped that the January 30th elections could provide a way for a credible, accountable-to-Iraqis administration to emerge inside Iraq, while also allowing a (relatively) violence-free way for the US administration to disengage from trying to control the affairs of that very troubled country.
It took a long time, after January 30, for the Iraqi parties to be able to reach agreement on the identity of the new Prime Minister and the make-up of the new government. While they dithered, I put up the ‘Democracy Denied in Iraq’ counter onto JWN’s sidebar.
Then finally, in late April, Ibrahim Jaafari was sworn in in front of the new elected Assembly as PM (though it took a little while longer for him to name some of his ministers.)
I took the counter down.
Today, after reading this account of the new “Iraqi” Foreign Minister openly and imho ignominiously appealing for greater US aid in crafting an Iraqi constitution, I decided it is time for the DDI counter to go back up.
That link is to a piece by Robin Wright in today’s WaPo. She writes:

In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but deliberations have been slowed as Iraq still works on the composition of a constitutional committee.
With time running out for writing the constitution and then holding elections in December for a permanent government, Zebari warned that the United States has withdrawn too much, leaving the new government struggling to cope and endangering the long-term prospects for success.

She wrote that Zebari also asked the Bushies for help on three other counts:

— to ” to help bring the Sunni minority into the political process” (!)
— for ” additional staff and resources to accelerate the creation of a new Iraqi army and police force”, and
— to “speed up the confirmation of its new ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad”.

It is fact that the Bushies have been without an ambassador in Baghdad since March 17, when Amb. John Negrocontra hotfooted it out of the country. That’s eleven vital weeks that the massive US diplomatic mission there has effectively been rudderless. As Wright notes, the DCM position in Baghdad has also gone through a transition in the past month.
Now, I’m not going to argue that having a local US viceroy in place to tell the Iraqi politicians what to do (which is exactly the way that Jon Lee Anderson, writing recently in The New Yorker described Khalilzad behaving in Afghanistan) is necessarily desirable… But you would think, wouldn’t you, that the Bush administration would want to have an accountable chain of command in place in Baghdad to help it to manage the extremely strategically sensitive situation there?
Well, you might think that, if you thought they actually wanted to have some kind of an orderly transition there….
As it is, the disgracefully “AWOL/negligent” policy that Washington has been pursuing inside Iraq seems almost to have been designed to bring about a situation of ever greater instability and distrust within the country…. (Perhaps with the ulterior aim of turning round to a formerly accusing world and saying, “So! You see those Iraqis can’t govern themselves. That’s why we simply have no option except to stay there….” And on Wednesday the Security Council, to its great shame, seemed to buy into that argument when it renewed the “mandate” that it graciously gave the US-led forces forces in Iraq for a further –slightly indeterminate?– term.)
And the result of all these machinations?

Certainly, the desire that the majority of Iraqi adults so clearly showed back on January 30th to have an orderly, nationally legitimate, and accountable governing system in place in their country has been most cruelly thwarted.
Now, you can argue (and I’m happy to do this) that Ibrahim Jaafari has been a great disappointment as the head of government.
You can argue that most Kurdish politicians have been outrageously unhelpful.
You can argue that many Sunni politicians have been disorganized, or intransigent, or worse.
But at the end of the day, under the Geneva Conventions (“quaint” or not), the US as occupying power has overall responsibility for the welfare of the country’s people and the integrity of its re-emerging political system.
The Iraqi people gave them a wonderful chance– on a plate, as it were!– by virtue of their participation in the January 30 elections…
There could have been a political process of integrity and hopefulness that emerged from the election of that day.
But no. The Bush administration cared only for the “form” of having one single democractic “exercise”… the vote of that day. They seemed to care not one whit for the true nub of democracy in Iraq…. That is, the institution of empowered and accountable self-government there. Indeed, looking at the wilful recklessness with which the Bushies have treated political affairs inside Iraq since January 30, you might have to conclude that they’ve been actively hostile to the emergence of any empowered self-government there.
I think I’ve written before– both here and elsewhere– that the Bushies have been handed two great chances inside Iraq. The first was in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of the Saddam regime, when the country was, effectively, theirs to remake. As we know, they blew that chance– badly.
The second was with the amazing (even if far from universal) level of trust that the Iraqi people put in the electoral process of last January 30. And now, the Bushies have blown that chance, too. This time, the repurcussions– inside Iraq, and for the Washington’s whole broader Potemkin-project of encouraging “democratization” in the Middle East– will be even worse.
They were very lucky indeed to get even a second chance. No-one can realistically expect that they will ever be given a third.