azmi bishara on implanting democracy:
When you consider that the invasion was preceded by 10 years of war followed by 15 years of sanctions, the fall wasn't "easy" by any count. The importance of studying the fall of Baghdad resides in the insight it gives into how a regime that rested on a personality cult grew hollow. It sheds light on a type of regime that disengaged itself from the concerns, rights and interests of the people, that lumped its citizens into an amorphous body called "the masses", and that believed that slogans were enough to make this body move, as though it had a single head to process the information it was fed.
(...) In Iraq, the eruption of popular energies came after the collapse of the regime that had kept such a tight cap on them. The explosion took two trajectories: one directed inwards, as previously repressed conflicts between diverse social forces erupted; the other directed outwards, in the form of resistance against the occupation. Both trajectories influence and feed off each other, of course. Resistance under conditions of an intense and bloody domestic power struggle quickly descends to a conflict over the reading of the past and, hence, the definition of the future. This conflict, in turn, contributes to the deconstruction of existing identities and the reconstruction of new identities shaped by the current political struggle and by attendant images of the self as victim and the other as interloper or proxy of the interloper, all reinforced by the spiralling cycle of violence, vengeance and retribution. These volatile forces may inflict great moral and material damage on the occupation, as they are doing in Iraq, but they do not offer a viable national alternative to a united Iraq.
(...) Democracy is an expression of the sovereignty of a nation and a form of exercising this sovereignty -- the most ideal form of exercising sovereignty, according to advocates of democracy, because it reflects the will of the people. Democracy cannot come into effect by manacling the sovereignty of a nation and dismantling a country as is currently taking place in Iraq and as some mad theorists had envisioned.
(...) No Arab state, at present, is immune to the spectre of fragmentation if it is subjected to the type of pounding visited upon Iraq.