Gunpoint Democracy in Iraq

The United States is now a formal colonial power in Iraq, and the combination of the Administration's deceptions and the mounting American casualties have dimmed the shine on the colonialists' boots. In March and April, public support for the war was in the neighborhood of 75 percent; by the end of July, it had fallen below 60 percent.

It might have fallen further but for the notion – peddled by Bush, as well as by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times – that the reason for the war didn't matter because the United States liberated the Iraqi people and is now building democracy in Iraq.

It is certainly true that the Iraqis are free from the extreme authoritarian brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime; unfortunately, it doesn't exactly follow that the Administration intends to create democracy in Iraq. An Administration that will play fast and loose with the truth on Iraq's putative weapons of mass destruction is entirely capable of doing the same regarding its true intentions for the future Iraqi government.

The question of what sort of society the United States is building in Iraq takes on tremendous significance, since Iraq may be just one of many. "We're going to get better over time," Lawrence Di Rita, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, told the Los Angeles Times. "We'll get better as we do it more often."

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