Democracy in Iraq???

Stupidity or duplicity? Those who are trumpeting the call for democracy in the Middle East are either fools of knaves. Since at least the early 19th century the caveat of Alexis DeTocqueville (echoed by John Stuart Mill) in Democracy in America has been that 'tyranny of the majority' is the major threat both to and by democracies. Needless to say at the time of DeTocqueville's first warning, the U.S. was a slave state widely engaged in genocide against the original inhabitants of our turf then being either driven into 'reserves' or slaughtered outright.

When Mill was speaking out in his native Britain a few decades later women were an oppressed majority -- subject to such indignities as divorce and expropriation of inherited properties without legal recourse. See his The Subjugation of Women -- or try this subject heading in a Google search. The Women's Revolution in Britain a few decades later blew up two castles in Scotland one dark and stormy night to punctuate their protest points.

The challenge to democracies has always been the protection of minority rights. Only in 1967 with the Loving v. Virginia decision did even marriage between Euros and minorities (African and native Americans or orientals) become a universal legal right in the U.S.

Needless to say, then, the democracy that the Bush administration is pressing to impose in Iraq is a very iffy proposition for those not members of the large Shiite majority -- rights of women, rights of Sunnis and Kurds? The following report from today's NY Times will hopefully not be the bellwether of things to come there. We should begin seeing outcomes this next few weeks.

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Baghdad Mayor Is Ousted by a Shiite Group and Replaced
By JAMES GLANZ
Armed men entered Baghdad's municipal building on Monday,
deposed the city's mayor and installed a member of Iraq's
most powerful Shiite militia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/international/middleeast/10iraq.html?th&emc=th
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
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