Some more required reading

"The raid on a mosque in Sadr City is another evidence that United States Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and the top generals on the ground have run out of ideas. The main victims are members of the Sadr movement and the Da'wa Party, whose leader is the current Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim Al-Ja'fari. The two groups have no history of good relations with the Americans and both have stood against the invasion of Iraq from the beginning. The latest showdown between these two entities -- the Sadris and the Da'wa -- was over the nomination of prime minister for the coming four years. Against the wishes of the US Embassy and its close Iraqi allies, Ibrahim Al-Ja'fari was nominated by one vote over the US favourite -- or "the lesser of two evils" -- Adel Abdul-Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The main problem that emerged from the recent Iraqi election, and the previous ones, is the devastating failure of US favourite candidates to achieve any success. This has been the case with democratic elections everywhere in the Middle East -- HAMAS is another stark example. Disturbing as it may be, this outcome is a test for the US rhetoric about democracy in the Middle East." The sleeping giant - Abbas Kadhim "Present western policy faithfully reproduces 19th-century European policy. This proposed the modernisation and democratisation of the Ottoman empire and the Persian monarchy, but only as a cover for colonial ambitions and for the dismemberment of those declining entities. Those colonial ambitions brought the Balkan cauldron to the boil, thus precipitating the first world war, which led to the second." Islam’s resistance movement "Iran, Palestine and Haiti demonstrate that it is no longer enough to be democratically elected. The Iranian election of June 2005 met with worldwide approval. A massive voter turnout was able to choose between candidates representing a wide range of different opinions within the framework of official Islamism. The West’s favoured candidate, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, fought a brilliant campaign and was expected to win. Nobody mentioned a nuclear threat. But everything changed abruptly after the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has made a series of unacceptable pronouncements about Israel. Iran is being swiftly demonised. Although it has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and denies any military nuclear ambitions, France’s foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, recently accused it of pursuing a “secret military nuclear programme” (1). The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has already forgotten last year’s election and has asked Congress for $75m to promote democracy in Iran. [snip] Winston Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. What seems to upset people now is their inability to predetermine the result of an election. If only democracies could be made to measure and guaranteed to fit." Democracy to order "It cannot be dissimulated that the Coalition is strictly American; that is, the Americans never really relied militarily on other powers. The British are there for political support –and possibly for logistical backup. Most of the occupation has been conducted by US troops. And for quite some time now there has been defection from within the ranks of the Coalition by powers that were originally allied with the cause. One could say that the number of countries participating today in the Coalition has diminished significantly, to the extent that the Americans are increasingly relying on private contractors to meet security needs. Today in Baghdad there are more mercenaries working for private security firms than there are troops from official Coalition members." Via The indispensable Nur al-Cubicle's "Straight Talk from the French on Iraq" markfromireland