On Tue, 18 Feb 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >The Kurdish leaders are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but
> >largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the
> >replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US
> >military officers.
>
> Which is pretty much what the U.S. did in Germany & Japan in 1945,
> right?
Yes, but it had a different significance because those bureaucracies were, for all their other faults, meritocratic. They didn't exclude 75% of their respective countries' populations. So it was possible to set up a democratic electoral system on that basis.
In Iraq, if the majority votes their will, the first thing they'll want to dismantle will be this bureaucracy. If we nix that, it would seem to imply that democracy is impossible.
Japanese democracy is still very weird, but German party democracy was soon as democratic as formal democracy gets.
Michael