This Washington Post (requires simple registration) article offers some hope about the upcoming Iraqi elections. No one can know for sure whether they will be successfully pulled off or even if, after successful elections, the result will be an increase in stability and peace. But it is the best hope the Iraqis and the Americans and their allies have now; there is now no other path forward.
P.S. I should point out, however, that Carlos Valenzuela, the U.N. official who is supervising the process seems remarkably dense:
The election commission decided to stain the finger of each voter to keep them from voting again, despite concerns that doing so might scare some people from going to the polls, he said. And he defended the use of the stain, despite problems during the recent presidential election in Afghanistan in which the wrong ink was applied and many voters found it could be easily removed.
“I tested it myself. I can tell you it cannot be taken off,” said Valenzuela, who has helped supervise 14 elections. “It really is top level.”
That’s just inviting the terrorists to kill anyone with a stained finger. Duh.
This section of Spooner’s “No Treason” seems pertinent:
“But even these pretended agents do not themselves know who their pretended principals are. These latter act in secret; for acting by secret ballot is acting in secret as much as if they were to meet in secret conclave in the darkness of the night. And they are personally as much unknown to the agents they select, as they are to others. No pretended agent therefore can ever know by whose ballots he is selected, or consequently who his real principals are. Not knowing who his principals are, he has no right to say that he has any. He can, at most, say only that he is the agent of a secret band of robbers and murderers, who are bound by that faith which prevails among confederates in crime, to stand by him, if his acts, done in their name, shall be resisted.
Men honestly engaged in attempting to establish justice in the world, have no occasion thus to act in secret; or to appoint agents to do acts for which they (the principals) are not willing to be responsible.
The secret ballot makes a secret government; and a secret government is a secret band of robbers and murderers. Open despotism is better than this. The single despot stands out in the face of all men, and says: I am the State: My will is law: I am your master: I take the responsibility of my acts: The only arbiter I acknowledge is the sword: If any one denies my right, let him try conclusions with me.
But a secret government is little less than a government of assassins. Under it, a man knows not who his tyrants are, until they have struck, and perhaps not then. He may guess, beforehand, as to some of his immediate neighbors. But he really knows nothing. The man to whom he would most naturally fly for protection, may prove an enemy, when the time of trial comes.”
I’m not sure I see just how it is especially pertinent.
Spooner’s arguments are designed to undercut voluntarist theories of government and to reveal its coercive nature. By themselves, they don’t give us much guidance in choosing whether one form of government is preferable to another. Given the feasible options of A) an election by secret ballot (preferably without stained thumbs to identify voters to terrorist beheaders) among a multitude of parties and candidates to choose an assembly that will be charged with writing a constitution that may create a modus vivendi among otherwise hostile groups, and B) civil war and warlordism, possibly leading to hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths and culminating in the establishment of absolute, brutal, and arbitrary dictatorship, which is preferable, given the set of preferences that Spooner held?
Spooner quite brilliantly demolished a variety of arguments that purported to establish the essentially voluntary nature of submission ot the state, on the grounds that the Constitution is a contract, that citizens have the vote, and so on. But Spooner’s refutations don’t tell us a great deal about choosing among a variety of coercive regimes, other than (given his views about liberty) that the least violent, predatory, and coercive is preferable to the others. If an election is likely to lead to the most preferable (or least undesirable) form of government, that would seem to lend moral justification to the election, without requiring that we accept the claim that by voting one has voluntarily agreed to pay taxes, obey unjust laws, or in any other way submit to the state.
(If you’d like to follow up on this line of argument, you’ll find another very strong critique of voluntarist theories of state power in the chapter “The Right to Ignore the State” in Herbert Spencer’s book “Social Statics.”)
The relevance involves the notion that the elections in Iraq will somehow lead to the formation of a “legitimate government” or even, following your reasoning, a less despotic government than, say, a disintegration of the country.
If the elections do lead to an improvement in the situation, great. “Less body count, more liberty” is the goal here. But I don’t see a logical reason why they should. We should seriously consider the possiblity that massive decentralization (“warlordism”) might be a better solution.
This odd idea first entered my head when I heard disturbing reports in the immediate aftermath of the USG invasion. It seems that many cities and towns spontaneously formed independant local governments. This coincided with the formation of militias and neighborhood patrols to stop looting, etc. Unfortunately, USG forces interfered with the ability of the local populations to defend themselves, since these local systems weren’t part of the central plan. (Obviously the central planning was inadequate in stopping the looting, kidnapping, and terrorism. Are we surprised?)
The formation of a central government through elections would likely lead to a propagation of the same sort of error. In addition, I suspect that the elections will be seen by the winner as a license to redistribute the coercively expropriated wealth into the hands of the victors. This is similar to how democracy works elsewhere, except in this case the ethnic tensions would seem to make an increase in violence more likely.
The situation in Somalia might offer an alternative. My (admittedly limited) understanding of the situation there is that once it became clear to the warring tribes that no central goverment was going to be re-established, the motives for conflict decreased substantially. Today things aren’t great there, but the situation has improved considerably, with real progress in infrastructure in commerce.