IRAQI DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM, AMERICAN STYLE

From the Washington Post:

After Iraq's Day of Rage, a Crackdown on Intellectuals

Iraqi security forces detained about 300 people, including prominent journalists, artists and lawyers who took part in nationwide demonstrations Friday, in what some of them described as an operation to intimidate Baghdad intellectuals who hold sway over popular opinion.

On Saturday, four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest of thousands at Baghdad's Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.

"It was like they were dealing with a bunch of al-Qaeda operatives, not a group of journalists," said Hussan al-Ssairi, a journalist and poet who described seeing hundreds of protesters in black hoods at the detention facility. "Yesterday was like a test, like a picture of the new democracy in Iraq."

And

"We said, 'What are you doing - we're journalists!' " Mahdi said. "And they said [expletive] journalism.' "

They loaded them into the Humvees, drove them to a side street, where they beat them again. Then, blindfolded, they were driven to a place Mahdi later recognized as the former Defense Ministry building, which houses an intelligence unit of the army's 11th Division.

Inside, they heard soldiers laughing and chanting "Maliki liar!" - mocking a slogan some protesters had shouted. Mahdi said he was taken to a room alone, and soon, he was being beaten with sticks, boots and fists. One soldier threatened to rape him, he said. They threatened to kill him. They took his shoes off, wet his feet and administered electric shocks to them.

In between, the soldiers interrogated him, he said. They accused him of being a tool of outsiders wishing to topple Maliki's government and demanded that he confess to being a member of the Sadaam Hussein's Baath party. Hadi explained that he blamed Baathists for killing two of his brothers. He told them that he'd been a member of Maliki's Dawa party until he recently became disillusioned.

"They said, 'You're Dawa?' " Hadi said. "Then I realized they were totally stupid."

More here.

Just following up a bit on yesterday's post: it's one hundred percent safe to say that the wave of democratic uprisings shaking the Middle East right now has absolutely nothing to do with President Bush and others' assertion that toppling Saddam Hussein would somehow result in democracy and freedom spontaneously occurring in the region. That's because we didn't really set up a functioning democracy in Iraq.

I mean sure, people vote and stuff there, but that's all theater, nothing but meaningless ritual designed to make the place only appear to be democratic, and it doesn't even really do a good job with that. Instead, it's more like one of the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Unrest in the streets? Round up the artists and intellectuals, rough 'em up a bit, shoot a few demonstrators in the streets. Soon enough, they'll be rolling in the tanks, just like Czechoslovakia back in the late 60s.

I can't help but think that if we'd done nothing in Iraq, the true wave of Middle Eastern democracy, the one we're seeing in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, would be hitting there right about now, and Saddam Hussein's laughably weak military would have been able to do nothing to stop it. Instead, we have a US established puppet regime, which is democratic in name only, trying to put out the fires of freedom.

This is kind of a shameful moment for America.

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