09/13/10 – Jon Basil Utley – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
It's a little bit loud in the studio today.
They're redoing the road outside.
And not even Chaos Radio Studios' LA Division's soundproofing can prevent all the noise and rattling from getting in here.
But it's not too bad, and I'll try to keep the mic down while my guest is talking.
My guest is John Basil Lutley.
He's associate publisher of the American Conservative Magazine, and you can find him at againstbombing.org and many other places.
But he's got this article at the American Conservative, the long version, is at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's amconmag.com, the American Conservative Magazine.
And the article is called Iraq's Dysfunctional Democracy, and it was reprinted all over the place.
Must have made some papers, but certainly made the website of many, many mainstream sites.
And good thing for that, too, because there's a heck of a lot of truth in here.
Welcome back to the show, John.
How are you, sir?
Thank you, Scott.
Fine.
It's very good to talk to you again.
So let's talk about the form.
Well, in fact, you know what?
You talk in here a little bit about why, well, kind of shrug a little bit, but to a degree anyway, over time, you could argue that America and Britain's democracies are somewhat functional.
Like, for example, the labor got thrown out, and there's this alliance between the conservatives and the liberals in England right now.
And you talk about that kind of coalition building under our systems, and so maybe that's a good basis to then compare what America did with Iraq's system.
I think exactly the point.
And that we, America, the American government promotes overseas a system that is called proportional representation, which is very different to what we have in the Anglo-Saxon countries.
We copied England to a degree.
But what we have is you vote, a person votes for a delegate in the parliament or the American Congress who represents their interests.
It's someone local, someone they know, someone who's been probably in minor political offices before in their district.
They know who they're voting for.
And we have a system also that's very accountable.
Every few years, you vote, have a chance to vote for this person.
What we promote in these foreign countries is something very different called proportional representation, where the party bosses or the party leaders decide who gets on party lists.
Okay, so what he's talking about here is, you know, in Iraq, everybody, what they basically have, especially if you look at the convention that wrote the Iraqi constitution, at gunpoint, of course, in the fall, early fall of 2004, and then the elections, the most important elections, well, I don't know, maybe last spring's war, but the elections of January 2005, there was no, I want to vote for Mr. Muhammad or Mr. Abdul.
Everything was, you either vote for the United Iraqi Alliance, or you vote for the Sunni slate, or you vote with the Kurds, or you vote with the Saudis.
And so it's, it became Muqtada al-Saudi and it became the Abdul Aziz al-Hakim who run the Supreme Islamic Council.
They got to pick who actually was going to the parliament, rather than the voters themselves picking individuals.
They only got to pick, who do you want to choose?
Do you want it to be Alawi that chooses, or do you want it to be Saud or Hakim or Talabani who chooses?
Scott, the point you're making, and I would add the American system with federalism, when America started, we were also multi-religious, multi-regional, the northern and southern regions had very distinct interests.
We started, and in those days Catholics and Protestants had a hundred years before been killing each other.
We were multi-religious, but we had a system that worked.
And then we have now, Americans are dying in Afghanistan to supposedly set up another democracy there.
But all over the world, people look at Iraq's government, if that's the creation of America, and America establishes democracy in the third world, nobody wants it.
Everyone killing each other, no safety, dysfunctional government.
So it's an important issue.
It's something people don't want to get into, studying electoral systems, etc.
And the article tries to make it in a very simple, direct form, with important links to back up what we say.
Now the government set up in Iraq is so dysfunctional, there's no hope that it can later work.
So now it may be the U.S. did this intentionally by the people around Rumsfeld, remember, who started the war, may have thought that by setting up a dysfunctional government in Iraq, then there's an excuse to keep American troops there forever and ever.
So there may have been intent, but the end result was this terrible system of electoral system.
And when you spoke about the English and American system, it's also what's used in Asia.
The Asian tigers that are so competent and effective in their economy have direct representation.
They copy the English.
India has direct representation, where Muslims, millions of Muslims and Hindus live together.
And it works.
There's events sometimes, you know, riots, but it generally works.
But what this other system of proportional representation, where party lists and party bosses decide everything, doesn't work.
And that's what we created.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny, you reminded me when you say it might have been deliberate.
Of course, David Windsor had written, I think, talking about Syria, but close enough, it's the same clean break that, you know, we want to expedite the chaos, the collapsing chaos.
We want, I guess, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Baathists in Syria to go to war and tear the country apart.
And it's and, you know, Chris Floyd actually found an old document about a plan to invade and conquer all of Mexico.
And it and it was to create a dysfunctional government with small, weak, warring clans and American occupations of all their oil fields forever.
John, it was a plan from between the world wars.
So that has happened before.
I mean, you know, you have to assume you can't always assume stupidity, which is what we usually assume in living in Washington.
But it's these different interests are pushing and this is what we created.
And the worst of this is that people then vote on their ethnic or religious and or religious lines because they're afraid that their neighbor is voting that way.
So rather than voting for the best candidate, they will vote for their same religious guy or the same the same ethnic or different ethnic groups.
And that's dysfunctional.
And you you let me add in the article several links.
You can find it by looking, searching for Iraq, government, Apli, you my name, UTL, a Y or Iraq, democracy, Apli, it's easy to find the abbreviation, the short version and the NBC and Yahoo dot com.
Right.
It's all over the web.
It's a great article.
It's also the American conservative magazine.
Again, it's Iraq, democracy, Apli.
Yeah.
UTL.
You'll find it in the viewpoints and antiwar dot com.
I think.
Thank you so much, John, for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm on the show at the end.
You want to come back?
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
OK.
Hi, John, you still there?
Yeah, I am.
I'm so sorry that we have to keep it so short.
I have this other interview coming up.
Oh, sure.
You know, some other time we might do a three way get someone else on on the subject.
Sure.
Yeah.
And in fact, yeah, because I was going to say if we had had more time, I think the next part of that was going to be, you know, there were circumstances in Iraq such as nobody could say that they were running for anything without getting shot in the face at the time.
And they had to they kind of had to hide behind their slates.
And then, of course, the the fact that we were toppling the minority dictatorship and bringing in a majority that ultimately doesn't need us to keep them in power once we help them cleanse Baghdad of the Sunnis.
One man, one vote, one time.
Yeah.
Right.
So there's the there's the suspended election right now, you know, from six months ago now.
That's gone nowhere that we didn't get to address.
Well, that's part of it.
That was sort of the background to it.
I kind of referred to it a little bit when I was stalling for you there.
But anyway, I sure hope you're feeling better, too.
No, I'm OK now.
I sometimes I just get that.
OK.
All right.
Well, I got to make this other call.
But it's great to talk to you again, sir.
Thanks, Scott.