It's the Elections, Stupid

Christopher Hitchens weighs in on the ongoing (and endless) debate over elections and democracy in Iraq in a typically provocative essay in Slate. An excerpt:

Hey-ho for another bonny New Year, once again trying to work out which of the "anti-war" arguments will turn out to be the real one. Topic for this week: Are elections democratic? You will perhaps recall that, at about this time last year, the New York Times made an editorial demand that the then-upcoming Iraqi elections be postponed. The reasoning given was that "security" made such elections impossible and that, in any case, the regions previously aligned with Baathism would not have a fair chance at a proper turnout. Apart from the fact that this logic would have given the saboteurs and video-beheaders an indefinite veto on an election process supervised by the United Nations, and apart from the weird sympathy for the minority who had been used to ruling permanently without elections, there seemed little to fault in this idea. Then came the moment we all now yawn about, with millions of people waiting patiently and getting purple fingers, which has since been repeated twice, to the point where elections in Iraq—Iraq!—have come to seem routine, even banal.