Riding their rhetoric right into the abyss of reality, the Republican Party and George W. Bush tumbled in the mid-term elections. Even into the last week of the campaign, Bush—after the largest one-month American death toll of the war—was proclaiming victory was around the corner. He would turn over control of the country to Iraq’s democratically elected government as soon as it proved itself stable and no sooner. But just what kind of democracy has the U.S. fostered in Iraq?

There are still the Saddam Hussein-era laws forbidding union organizing in most of the economy, laws that remained through the rule of the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Government after the invasion and kept in the current “democratic” regime. More recently the Iraqi government passed a new batch of laws criminalizing what we previously have known as free speech. These laws, some of them lifted verbatim from Saddam’s penal code, punish anyone who “publicly insults” the government or its officials with up to seven years in prison. The New York Times reports that about a dozen journalists have been charged under these laws so far.

But Iraq’s government is arguably only mirroring the current American style of democracy. In Iraq, U.S. forces have held without charges since last April an Associated Press photographer who was shooting pictures of insurgents.

This is in line with the new anti-terrorist law Bush and Congress passed last September. It not only grants the president the power to re-interpret the Geneva Conventions and redefine what is allowable torture. It also broadens the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to include not just those who actually fight the U.S., but anyone who allegedly provides financial aid or other indirect support to terrorists. And that allegation can be made by any “competent tribunal” established by the president or secretary of defense.

Based solely on that allegation, the accused is denied the constitutional right of “habeas corpus,” that is the right to challenge one’s incarceration and charges in a court of law. Bush and his replacement for Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director Robert Gates, can now throw anyone they want in jail without charges indefinitely and without recourse. This presumably is based on the theory that if you don’t try to burn the witch, how will you ever be sure you’ve found one.

It seems you can measure the success of Bush’s policy to export democracy around the world by how little of it we have left here.

—Steve Stallone
    Editor