Sex, Lies, and Statistics

The Angry Arab News Service says exactly what I was thinking when reading the results of a nationwide poll of Iraqis:

In a new BBC poll of Iraqis, US favoured son, international embezzler, Ahmed Chalabi had no support at all, while Saddam Hussein remains one of the six most popular politicians in the country. And Chalabi is the least trusted leader in the whole of Iraq. By the way, after reading about the report on the poll on the BBC website, I was rather surprised with some of the advertised results. So I retrieved the full text of the report (warning: .pdf file). Read and judge for yourself. Very very suspicious and unreliable, in my estimation, and the BBC website adds a positive spin that does not necessarily conform with the contents and the results.

In spite of it being a .pdf, I encourage you to read the file. Compare it to the headline and text of the BBC article.

Then Professor Kahlil adds something I never would have considered:

Also, I find it absolutely unbelievable that Ayatollah Sistani (and his name was wrongly identified as Said instead of `Ali) scored so low on people's preference for leader, as did Al-Hawzah, while Saddam got some points. There is something wrong here, and often the problem is translation and methodology. For example, Professor Ingelhart at the University of Michigan has been running public opinion surveys around the world in more than 70 countries. In one published volume of his work, Human Values, people in more than 40 countries were asked who are their least favorite neighbors. And in Turkey, more than 90 per cent of respondents allegedly said that Muslims are their least favorite neighbors. This tells you why I get suspicious about some Western-conducted surveys in Middle East lands. Also, in this poll, people have high preference for religious leaders (more than 40 percent), and yet religious leaders scored low when people were asked about their choices.

This makes sense--considering the rather abysmal state of Western knowledge regarding the Middle East in general, the polling data should be taken with a grain of salt. As noted below, my own opinion is that most Iraqis are happy that Hussein is gone--but that doesn't mean ALL are, NOR does it mean they love us. Iraqis aren't stupid, and they know exactly who Saddam's Sugar Daddy was for all the years he ran the show. In fact, some Iraqis likely benefitted from the Hussein regime--duh. A police state runs in part because of a large bureaucracy--which means jobs for a good number of people. And those folks are likely none too happy that the gravy train ground to a halt.

Were some of these bureaucrats professional torturers? I don't doubt it. Torturers are on the payroll of most despotic regimes, and might even be here or there in a democracy. That said, to suggest that EVERY bureaucrat in the Hussein regime was engaging in sadistic acts is a foolish charge, and demonstrates utter ignorance as to how any nation state--despotic or not--functions.

It is also foolish to suggest that all of Iraq was quaking in its boots on a daily basis under the Hussein regime. Even massively despotic regimes like Hussein's--or, for that matter, the Shah of Iran's--cannot function with that level of terror. Again, those who've actually studied national governments and their means of organization know that despotic regimes which practice torture do so not on the entire body public, but on select members of the public--the idea is to teach a lesson to everyone else. Both the Shah and Hussein did this to political opponents, real or imagined, and religious leaders. In the case of both, this kept secular political opposition out of the picture, but had the effect of making religious leaders a de facto alternative. That's a MAJOR reason why Iran is now a theocracy, and why Iraq is likely to become one.

That's not to say torture is "OK." No, it isn't. But the grisly stories coming from the neo-cons tell us a lot more about them than they do about Hussein in particular, or the Middle East in general.

The fact is that torture, for instance, is practiced by ALL regimes in the Middle East--don't kid yourselves. Getting hysterical about Saddam's torture these days is nothing more than a cynical attempt to justify the invasion after the fact, now that the WMD lie has been seen for what it is--a lie.

By the way: I'll be happy to rake Bill Clinton over the coals on this one too--he used the WMD canard to bomb the country in 1998, which I thought at the time, and still think today, was a very cynical attempt to deflect attention from the Monica Lewinsky incident.

In the end, most Iraqis probably don't give a damn as to who is running the government--sort of like the way most US citizens don't really care who runs OUR government. The idea that they've been pining for the last 25 years for Western (back in the day, White, Anglo-Saxon) Democracy is nothing more than a neo-con wet dream. Iraq, or the political entities that preceded it, has maintained a degree of civilized organization for thousands of years. Whether or not we in the USA appreciate their method of organization matters not one bit to them. And, as far as Western Democracy is concerned, to attempt to impose it by force in IRAQ of all places is vain-glorious and foolish. It won't work, and we are paying the price for trying.

"Democracy" in Iraq, like it or not, is a term that will be ultimately defined by the Iraqis themselves.