The U.S. government and mainstream media are openly hysterical over the recent turn of events in the Middle East. Continuing Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-British occupation and factional infighting in the democratically-elected parliament, the free and fair election of a Hamas government in Palestine, the threat of Hezbollah-led armed forces in Lebanon, and democratic Iran’s refusal to submit to U.S.-led demands that it renounce its nuclear program: these pose serious problems for the imperium. The Bush administration pursued a policy of invasion, occupation and repression in a self-proclaimed quest to spread Western-style “representative democracy” in the region. And yet now, confronted with the results of democratic elections in Iraq, Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon, it pounds the table in protest and gives Israel the green light to go to war against Lebanon.

Electoral Democracies, Imperial Nightmares

The U.S. government and mainstream media are openly hysterical over the recent turn of events in the Middle East. Continuing Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-British occupation and factional infighting in the democratically-elected parliament, the free and fair election of a Hamas government in Palestine, the threat of Hezbollah-led armed forces in Lebanon, and democratic Iran’s refusal to submit to U.S.-led demands that it renounce its nuclear program: these pose serious problems for the imperium. The Bush administration pursued a policy of invasion, occupation and repression in a self-proclaimed quest to spread Western-style “representative democracy” in the region. And yet now, confronted with the results of democratic elections in Iraq, Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon, it pounds the table in protest and gives Israel the green light to go to war against Lebanon.

A succession of Democratic and Republican administrations have worked to secure the renunciation—generally against the wishes of the local population—of any and all popular or nationalist aspirations in the Middle East that don’t fit in with the agendas of the U.S. and Israel. To this end, the US expects Middle Eastern nation-states to accept American-Israeli hegemony—a hegemony which in the past has guaranteed the U.S. access to the region’s resources and Israel a free hand in its territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinians.

This state of affairs was, until recently, relatively secure. However the fall of the Soviet Union (and its Eastern European trade bloc) encouraged some within the U.S. to attempt to turn a vision of a unipolar New World Order into a fait accompli enforced world-wide through military means. The coming to power of George Bush’s neo-conservative regime, coupled with the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, was the green light for invading Iraq in a bid to lock down U.S. control of the world’s most valuable resource, oil. But now, thanks to rampant corruption, strategic incompetence and just plain overreach, U.S. military forces are bogged down, exposed and vulnerable. And this weakness has given hope to the peoples of the region. Those who can vote have voted accordingly, just as those who can resist have resisted ferociously. The mirror image of armed resistance in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon is electoral defiance at the polls.

However you would never know it from the American mass media, which plays like small change in the pocket of the same interests that fund the nation’s politicians. Six corporations control all major American newspapers, magazines and TV outlets and two of the three major television networks (NBC and CBS) are owned by military contractors. This corporate synergy decrees that the media support every big business-sanctioned initiative, including wars, emanating from Congress or the White House. At the same time the gutting of critical and investigative news reporting in favor of Fox News broadcast style press-release and official-source stenography has been a further boon to government propaganda efforts. The end result is a mass media that fails to provide any news or analysis that might undermine the U.S. establishment’s world-view. Typical of this acquiescence is CNN executive Eason Jordan’s recent revelation that in the spring of 2003 he “went to the Pentagon myself several times before the [Iraq] war started and met with important people there and said, for instance—‘at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war’—and we got a big thumbs-up on all of them.” (CNN, 4/20/03). Not only does the emperor have no clothes; he is so arrogant he parades it on his own TV network.

The truth (obvious everywhere but in U.S. media accounts) is that most of the Iraqi population detests the American-British occupation, along with all efforts to loot Iraqi oil or control the course of self-government. The insurgency is unlikely to go away because it’s an open secret that the cost of occupation cannot be sustained indefinitely. Back in the U.S. and Britain, sparkling media announcements about coalition “progress,” TV staged high-tech night raids, and radio features on the “rebuilding” effort might fool some, but it’s no substitute for failure on the ground.

And in the Middle East, the voting public knows it. Hence Iraq, where the make-up of the political parties in the National Assembly reflects a population split neatly along religious and ethnic lines. Having succeeded in the electoral box, the political players in the so-called “unity” government are just waiting for the U.S. and Britain to leave so they can carve up what is left of the country. In Palestine the general population perceived that it had little to lose by embracing Hamas as an alterative to the ineffectual and corrupt PLO. Answering Israeli nationalism in kind, the vote for Hamas served notice that as far as the Palestinians are concerned, territorially speaking, the Gaza strip and West Bank are just a beginning. As for Iran’s elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he has had little inclination to be bullied by the U.S., given his country’s crucial role as a world oil provider. Besides, Iraq is right next door, and its majority Shia population would not respond well to any “preventative strikes” against Iran’s nuclear program, UN sponsored or otherwise. And then there is Lebanon’s governing coalition, which includes Hezbollah. Plainly, the citizens of Lebanon have not forgotten the beleaguered plight of the Palestinians nor are they willing to acquiesce to Israeli interference in their internal affairs.

And so, electoral democracy has got the U.S. in a pickle. Elections have emboldened the resolve of a wide range of opposition voices throughout the region because they reflect, however imperfectly, popular opinion. That opinion has been shaped by a lengthy record of Western-sponsored coups and dictatorships, military strikes and invasions, boycotts, sanctions, occupations, and the triumphal belligerence of the region’s premier neo-colonial settler state, Israel. One wonders, then, what the U.S.-Israeli alliance would do if the electoral lid came off in, say, Pakistan or Egypt? What if sham elections in these key client states morphed into the real thing? Imagine the Islamic Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt or a religious fundamentalist party with a nuclear bomb in Pakistan. Add the current government in Iran, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iraqi debacle and you have George W. Bush’s living nightmare—the spread of out-of-control electoral democracy in the Middle East.

This editorial appears in the Fall 2006 issue of Alternative Press Review.