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RIA Novosti
January 31, 2005
ELECTIONS IN IRAQ AND THE DIFFICULT FATE OF RUSSIAN DEMOCRACY
MOSCOW. January 31. (RIA Novosti political commentator Pyotr Romanov.)

According to George Bush and Tony Blair, the elections in Iraq, for all the explosions, the barbed wire around polling stations, the failure to vote in the Sunnite provinces and other details, so exotic for a normal election process, should be considered valid and even successful. While they announced this news, the two leaders also expressed their condolences for the U.S. and British troops who died making sure that voting took place. They also mentioned the voters who either failed to reach the polls or who died on their way back home.

Those who had warned Washington and London that invading Iraq was a mistake have admitted with some embarrassment that the elections were valid. So, let us join the latter, not without embarrassment either. What has happened is the least of evils. The elections leave at least a chance for a civilized solution to the crisis and the earliest withdrawal of the "liberating occupiers" from the country. So far, their real success is confined to putting Saddam Hussein in prison and that the famous mosaic of George Bush Senior in a Baghdad hotel is no longer trodden upon by tourists, much to the satisfaction of White House officials.

As regards everything else, the U.S. has suffered a major defeat. A defeat in a war is not necessarily surrender. Defeat comes when it becomes obvious that a war cannot be won. Sometimes the defeated leave a country with dignity, as the French did in Algeria. Others leave while fighting an enemy to the very last moment, as the Russians did in leaving Afghanistan. Some do not just leave but flee, as was the case with the Americans in Vietnam. I suspect that the Americans and the British will leave Iraq to the accompaniment of a victorious fanfare, concealing their defeat in every way.

One should not rejoice at the setbacks of the allies in the antiterrorist coalition, but Russia should make due conclusions. Unfortunately, the invasion of Iraq, far from diminishing the terrorist potential in the Muslim world, has increased it, while there still is no adequate policy to counter the terrorist threat effectively.

That the Americans were not attacked seriously after September 11 does not so much show that their protective measures are effective (though they did played their role), but that a terrorist no longer needs to cover a great distance to kill an American. There are easy targets in Baghdad's streets. Just count the losses of the allies in the Iraqi campaign and compare them with the losses on September 11. According to official reports, about 3,000 people died when the twin towers collapsed in the New York, whereas the U.S. and its allies have already lost over 1,600 soldiers in Iraq. This figure does not take into account civilian losses (tens of thousands have died), but it continues to grow with every passing day. It will keep on doing so, considering that, according to some statements, the Americans will stay in Iraq for at least two years after the elections.

However Russia must think about its own problems. This particularly concerns the Russian democrats. I remember a scene I watched when once I entered an office of a Russian official, a democrat (today he is a senator), who gripped his head as he watched NATO aircraft bombing Belgrade on TV. "What are they doing?!" he moaned. "Don't they understand that they are hitting their own people? How many votes will we win at the next elections after this?" I remember that at that time Russia's Union of Right Forces (SPS) expressed sharp criticism against the air strikes against Yugoslavia. They were, naturally, not thinking about Slobodan Milosevic but about their own fate.

The picture of the Iraqi elections is far more vivid than the old picture of Yugoslavia. At the start of last century, a famous Russian battle artist, Vasily Vereshchagin, painted a great picture called "The Apotheosis of War" showing an immense pile of skulls. Incidentally, his paintings to no small degree facilitated the emergence of the international pacifist movement. When an exhibition of his pictures before World War I moved to Germany, the General Staff prohibited German officers from visiting it, to ensure that their combat spirit was not undermined. What has been happening recently in Iraq may well be called "the apotheosis of democracy," and young democrats should also be banned from seeing it lest their liberal spirit is undermined.

Russian democrats themselves, who made many mistakes during the revolutionary reforms, are primarily to blame for the problems facing Russia's democracy today; but the West, too, has done everything to discredit the notion of democracy in the eyes of ordinary Russians. After the criticism addressed to Moscow after the elections in Chechnya or the unpleasant words about the Kremlin's interference in Ukraine's affairs, the "apotheosis of democracy" in Iraq has clearly demonstrated the West's double standards, which cannot but deal a direct blow to the authority of democracy and the democrats.

If one or two similarly "democratic elections" follow, pro-Western advocates in Russia will become an endangered species. The question is how much the West, Russia and genuine democracy will gain from this.