Vol 5. Iss. 1: Beyond the Polls

by Natalie Noel Keefe

“Nothing’s perfect.” In a committee hearing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified that, this upcoming January, voting may not be an option for Iraqis living in areas with the most concentrated violence. Yet as the death-toll rises for the fourth consecutive month, both majorparty candidates, President George W. Bush (R) and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) seem to have been avoiding the question everyone wants answered: Is the US public willing to accept the consequences of our past, present, and future actions regarding the presidential elections and the war in Iraq?

Let’s take a look at history. In 1964, when there were alleged attacks on the US by North Vietnamese gunboats, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to resolve the conflict by any means necessary. Similarly, weapons of mass destruction were the false pretenses under which Congress gave current President Bush the carte blanche to invade Iraq. So soldiers were sent over in anxiety, and returned shrouded in secrecy. Sydney H. Schanberg from The Village Voice noted, “Soldiers’ parents went on the open market back home to buy state-of-the-art body vests with ceramic-plate reinforcement…” Cameras were banned from the Dover, Delaware, site where “transfer tubes” (the Administration’s glossy term for body bags) of American G.I.’s are sent. “The Dover test,” the American public’s tolerance for wartime fatalities, has increased. The psychological frame “if we don’t see it, it must not exist” has proven key to the Administration’s success. In light of the past, do we think of the Iraqis’ struggle on the ground every day? In reality, we have little idea what it’s really like.

But Hannah Allam does. Ms. Allam, the Baghdad bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, knows about the present situation because she has lived in Iraq since the invasion. She is alarmed by Rumsfeld’s pat answer that marking off a couple of major provinces for elections would be no big deal – when, in fact, it would disenfranchise a large segment of the Iraqi population. Similarly, if our own Secretary of Defense thinks any election (even an unrepresentative one), is a good election, what does that say about the quality of our elections here in the good ol’ USA, much less the Bush Administration? And what of the draft? By March 31st, 2005, the President wants “the decks [cleared] for a first lottery by June 15th, 2005.”

When Hannah Allam looks outside her balcony in Baghdad, the texture of her world is uncanny. She sees “razor wire…thick concrete walls . . . children playing . . . Iraqis eating ice cream drowned out by the rumble of a tank.” How many young Americans’ lives must end in violence and secrecy? How many children must die from bombings in Baghdad? Will we be thinking of both sets of the dead when we walk into the booths on November 2nd, or just the former – or perhaps neither? More than anything, this election may really be about the just right of the governed to act when we disagree with faulty foreign policy concerning our future as citizens of the world.