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Reporters love to quote the Iraqi legislator Mahmoud Othman. Here’s an example of why. From a piece about a parliamentary impasse possibly delaying January’s national election:
Mr. Othman said going beyond Jan. 31 would not necessarily make the elections illegitimate. “Nothing in Iraq is very legitimate,” he said. “We have violated a lot of things in this country in the last six years.”
Very quotatious.
To riff off this for a second: it’s a pithy quote, but it clearly means something somewhat different than what it appears on its face. Othman isn’t dismissing the idea of legitimacy. He’s saying Iraqis have come to judge legitimacy along a different standard than Americans. They weight it differently than we do, in other words.
As it happens, last night I was talking about Afghanistan over dinner with some smart people, and one of them made the provocative the international community might be making too much out of Karzai’s election theft. After all, the individual said, it’s not like Afghans have come to expect any kind of clean government, and accordingly, that’s not what they demand. They demand the corruption be reined in and justice be provided — and, especially, that security return. There has to be a lesson in the evident fact that Americans, myself included, might be more freaked out over Karzai’s election theft than Afghans are.
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I don’t mean to be coarse, but sort of like, duh. Not that it’s necessarily the case that it’s not as big a deal there, but i mean, you had to wonder didn’t you? It’s not like they expected Switzerland. Elections in warzones don’t work that way, and, I mean, this is Afghanistan we’re talking about. Again: doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal. But we’re not mourning lost Afghan innocence here, right?
Nothing of the sort. Just riffing. It took an outside perspective for me to wonder if Americans — and in particular myself — had substituted our own judgment for that of Afghans. I always mean to catch this sloppy tendency in myself, and if the price is a pretty banal post, so be it.
Hmm. I always did think that was the case.
It has been my assumption that the problem with government corruption and nepotism in Afghanistan wasn’t the corruption itself, but how it interfered with broad delivery of government services.
The people couldn’t give a shit less. Give them security and education for their kids and a chance to make a decent living and see a doctor every now and then and they’ll bless any kind of government at all.
Indeed, that is the basis for a lot of the success the Taliban, or Hezbollah for that matter, has had. The people recognize it as a trade-off, and it’s a deal they’re more than willing to make, with just about anybody….
mikey
You might want to look into the Taliban and allowing access to doctors, particularly one’s that practice “non-Islamic” medicine. Things like vaccinating children are sometimes out of bounds.
it is an important question — I don’t find the post banal in the least. It’s just that the primary sensation I’ve gotten about that election since the end of August was confusion, so I doubted just about everything I heard.
I actually do get the impression now that it is a BFD there, myself. But the question is why. I get the sense that if Karzai wasn’t so deeply distrusted to begin, the same level of fraud might have blown over. Or maybe it was just too massive to ignore. It seems like the combo of not knowing either what Afghans’ baseline expectations/reaction would be AND having little sense of how extensive or limited the cheating was going to be left the coalition (and the UN) with basically little purchase on the situation at all.