Galloway on dictatorship vs democracy

[faceless]

Only a dictator can end Iraq violence: debate audience
Published: Thursday, 1 February, 2007, 10:47 AM Doha Time
Staff Reporter


From left to right: Sabah al-Mukhtar, Robert Baer, Tim Sebastian, George Galloway and Adnan Pachachi

A majority (67%) of the Doha Debates audience believed that only a dictator could end the violence in Iraq, while British parliament member George Galloway and the veteran Iraqi diplomat Adnan Pachachi convinced some 300 students that democracy can bring stability to Iraq. Galloway attacked the Arab “dictatorships”, blaming them for disunity that has led to the domination of their wealth by the US-led West. "If the Arab leaders believe that they are loved by their people, why don’t they test themselves in free and fair elections,” he asked. “If a dictator is the one who would bring stability, so he is.” Galloway told the debate yesterday that when Hamas was elected in Palestine, the American refused to deal with it.

Pachachi said democracy didn’t fail in Iraq, but its principles were distorted by holding elections under the American military presence. “Also democracy can bring one strong leader,” he said. The Iraqi tasted democracy by elections, and they are not going to let it slip out of their hands.” He believed that return of secularism was the solution to the mayhem in their country. Answering a question from the audience, Pachachi said that the Iraqi people didn’t want to bring monarchy back to their country.

Supporting the motion, the former CIA officer Robert Baer said that democracy wouldn’t work “at this stage” in Iraq, because the country needs one “strong and benign” leader who can unify all of Iraq’s ethnic people together. He admitted that he was part of the “fiasco” called democracy in Iraq. “The democracy in Iraq must go through a transitional period led by a strong leader after the departure of the foreign troops.” The former CIA man said that what was happening now in Iraq was unplanned and unpredicted. No one in the US knew then the difference between Sunnis and Shias.

Also defending the motion, Iraqi lawyer Sabah al-Mukhtar told the audience that no state was ever created by leadership at the beginning, as there must be a strong leader first. He said that the surrounding Arab regimes would like to the absence of democracy in Iraq because they are themselves under dictatorship.

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My personal opinion is that a dictatorship would be the lesser of two evils as the current situation is causing nothing but utter chaos.

[Brown Sauce]

[Sandino]

There is no or litttle democracy in Iraq, therfore one can not say that the "democracy project" in Iraq failed. The US presence is still strongly undermining Iraqi public opinion. The 1st thing the US did after the elections was to undermind what the iraqis strongly wanted, namly to get a table for withdrawl. The US never wanted free elections, they vetoed 3 times agains a propusal for democracy by Sistani. It lead to massive peacefull demostrations and forced the US to finaly accept elections.

So the Iraqi people want democracy, they want freedom, but a kind of freedom our politicians cant even understand...... they want freedom from us.(quote from R.Fisk)