Dissenting voices

The prevailing wisdom among the pundits is that the capture of Saddam Hussein will seriously damage the anti-occupation insurgency and that more Iraqis, now certain that Saddam will not return to power, will open up about information they have.

But will they? Is that the only possible outcome? The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), in an article about rallies of, and US clashes with, supporters of Saddam Hussein in the wake of his capture, has this:

"Resistance will increase, and spread throughout Iraq," said Mohammed Bashar al-Faydi, a prominent Sunni scholar, in an interview with the Qatar-based al-Jazeera satellite channel. "Instead of the Sunni triangle [the area north and west of Baghdad where attacks have been concentrated] it will be the whole Iraqi quadrangle!" he said.

According to al-Faydi, "Many Iraqis did not join the resistance for fear of Saddam returning to power. Now that there is no fear that he will return to power, the resistance will spread to the [predominantly Shia] south of Iraq, and become stronger."

Al-Faydi is looking at the same set of facts and coming to the exact opposite conclusion from the one that the White House is trying to peddle. If getting the US out no longer risks Saddam coming back, he's saying, people will be emboldened to resistance rather than to cooperation.

In a similar vein, a few voices have suggested that with the specter of Saddam gone, the people of Iraq will become even more impatient with the lack of progress on political, economic, and reconstruction fronts. A sign of that might be found already in the southern province of Babylon, according to another IWPR item.

In the southern Iraqi town of al-Hilla, demonstrators are camped out in the streets to demand that United States-led coalition administrators practice the democracy they preach when it comes to local government.

Since December 10, up to 5,000 protesters have been sleeping in tents and cooking their meals in front of the provincial government building as they stage their peaceful sit-in.

Their initial demand was for the removal of a governor whom they accused of corruption, and then they began protesting about the failure of the Coalition Provisional Authority, CPA, to hold democratic elections for his successor. ...

Governor Witwit resigned three days into the protests, and the CPA replaced him with former air force officer Imad Lefta Merdan.

However, protesters were left unhappy by the change, which went against two of their three demands. As well as getting rid of the old governor, they wanted his replacement to be a civilian and to be democratically elected rather than appointed from above.

A nonviolent protest in favor of democracy, it seems, should be part of the "good news about Iraq" we're persistently told we're not hearing. So why aren't the White House and it's right-wing media mouthpieces pushing this bit of news? Maybe because

[t]he CPA is said to be concerned that if municipal elections were held, radicals opposed to the foreign administrators would win. It has also said that elections are not feasible in the chaos of post-war Iraq, given the uncertain security and the absence of electoral rolls.

But advocates of elections say workable voter lists could be compiled if the authorities decided to do so.

So why haven't they done so? That question, I'd say, has already been answered.