The right to vote in the US elections

[gregory]

I think every citizen of any country who has been affected by US foreign policy should have the right to vote for the next US President.

For example, it hardly seems fair that the US can intrude into Iraq, set up what is essentially a puppet government (catering to every US whim), and then deny ordinary Iraqis the right to vote in the new elections.

As a Brit, I have not been personally affected by the Iraq war. But I have friends who, being in the army, have had to go to Afghanistan to fight. You might say I should blame Tony Blair for joining the war effort, but I don’t, because I realise that his hand was forced by the US. He had no choice but to join your phony war on terror.

So why don’t my friends have the right to vote for your next President?

[koifer]

Um…your friends willingly signed up for the army. They knew they could be sent off to a war they didn’t agree with. That’s why they have no right to vote it our country. They made their bed, now let them sleep in it.

[Maytacera]

As a Brit, I have not been personally affected by the Iraq war. But I have friends who, being in the army, have had to go to Afghanistan to fight. You might say I should blame Tony Blair for joining the war effort, but I don’t, because I realise that his hand was forced by the US. He had no choice but to join your phony war on terror.

He was not forced. George Bush did not hold a gun to his head and force him to join the war effort. If you want to complain about it, you would be right to complain about Blair.

Your friends did not join the American army. They are not fighting on behalf of America. They are representing YOUR country in the war.

[Cyrene]

For example, it hardly seems fair that the US can intrude into Iraq, set up what is essentially a puppet government (catering to every US whim), and then deny ordinary Iraqis the right to vote in the new elections.

---

I was barely even annoyed when I saw the headline that an anti-war Web site put on it: Dozens more die in Bush’s war was the general thrust of the thing. It was as if al-Qaida had played only a walk-on part in its own atrocities. We are sometimes told in weirdly neutral tones that the attendant sectarian mayhem has been “unleashed” or even “fueled” by the arrival of the coalition, terminology that has the same exculpatory effect. But Allawi’s work is impatient with rhetoric of this kind, or perhaps I should say incompatible with it. He states plainly that:

“When the Coalition arrived in Baghdad on 9 April, 2003, it found a fractured and brutalized society, presided over by a fearful, heavily armed minority. The post-9/11 jihadi culture that was subsequently to plague Iraq was just beginning to take root. The institutions of the state were moribund; the state exhausted. The ideology that had held Ba’athist rule together had decayed beyond repair.”

I pause to make two points. First, it’s a pleasure to see someone use the word brutalized correctly, to mean not so much the experience of being maltreated as the familiarity with being brutal. Second, if what Allawi says is true, then Iraq was headed straight for implosion and failure, both as a state and a society, well before 2003. Not only this, but its Sunni ruling elite was flirting increasingly with a Salafist ideology. In such circumstances—as many Iraqi dissidents argued even at the time—the United States had to face the alarming fact that a ruined Iraq was in its future whether it intervened or not.

How had a country that was bursting with oil wealth and development in the 1970s become a sweltering, violent basket case? Because the historic compromise between Sunni and Shiite, uneasy as it was, had been ripped apart by dictatorship and overseas aggression. As Allawi phrases it:

"The state removed the elements that kept a vigorous Shi’a identity alive in parallel to a Sunni-dominated state. Nationalizations, emigration and expulsions destroyed the Shi’a mercantilist class; the state monopoly on education, publishing and the media removed the cultural underpinnings of Shi’a life. … When the state embarked on the mass killings after the 1991 uprisings, Iraq became hopelessly compromised in the minds of most Shi’a.

And this is to say nothing of the Kurds: the one-fifth of Iraqi society who, as Allawi points out, had already left the Iraqi state by the time the coalition arrived. Without needing or wishing to soften any critique of post-invasion planning, I would propose that this analysis has a highly unsettling implication. Hell was coming to Iraq no matter what."

This point is undergirded by another one, which is that hell was already making considerable strides in Iraq in the decade before 2003. Again, Allawi’s cool analysis and careful evidence darkens this already black picture. All the crucial indices, from illiteracy to unemployment to the emigration of talent and skill, were rapidly heading south. Perhaps most ominously, the reaction of Saddam Hussein was to ratchet up religious and theocratic rhetoric and policy, broadcasting for jihad 'round the clock, engaging in a massive mosque-building program, and launching sporadic “morals” campaigns. Again, U.S. policy could hardly be indifferent to this distress and misery and demagogy, if only because the whole context was shaped by two largely American decisions.

• A Hell of a Country
  Ali Allawi’s new memoir shows Iraq’s collapse was inevitable.
  By Christopher Hitchens

[Zak]

U.S. Citizens do not even have the constitutional right to vote in a Presidential Election. Why the hell should non-citizens?

[Cyrene]

Why should iraqi’s be able to vote for anything anywhere besides Iraq? they’re society is in a state of brutalizing civil war with massive death tolls, which they’re largely, largely doing to themselves, with other religious factions trying to fan it, and the US trying to stomp it (stomping it in a grossly inefficient manner, which means it was done in such a way it may never be ab le to succeed and death-toll is the cost)

howver the hell was coming to iraq with or without america, the reason involved are less sketchy then people imagine, bush was relying on non-american intel for one, for two weapons inspectors didn’t have a serious attempt to search under the baath party for such weapons, not only did they know he had used weapons of horror before, chemical, etc, but they also knew where he got it from…

1/5th of iraqis had already left, and as stated above the real hell that we see now, was coming with or without the US. Now, the US, this is your responsibility, if only because choices in US history had largely influenced it, but again, with all the cowardly countries backing down and calling it an illegal war (without ever looking what was happening to iraqi civilizaation or what was going to happen) its just lazy. Most people want to ignore iraq and wish it never happenedd but the US has real obligations there, despite they’re total hack job of a war the iraqis wouldn’t be better off without them.

I hope the US leaves IRaq, if only to show the liberals exactly whats going to happen then.

[Mastriani]

I hope the US leaves IRaq, if only to show the liberals exactly whats going to happen then.

Although I understand why you say this, ideologically, it is the last thing that you actually want to happen.

It would cause a war of rather cataclysmic proportions. Plainly, all the noise by the Democrats, is so much lip service to a sector of constituents who are bereft of knowledge of not only the Middle East dynamics, but the effects of warfare and creating a vacuum.

[Wobbly]

For all the rhetoric, and all the mistakes regarding war, the one thing that was not phony and was not a mistake, was invading Afghanistan.

As for the notion that every citizen in every country affected by our catastrophic mistakes ought to have the right to vote in our elections…I don’t think that is what you want, steps toward a world government when that government is the United States… How about this, we put Bush on trial for treason, elect another dick-head president. And slowly fade away as our economy is destroyed and we alienate every country in the world. Or, maybe, I ought to demand something from your government, for allowing itself to be bullied and manipulated and not stopping the run to war in Iraq before it got started.

You see, about 25% of America is an ultra-right-wing ultra-mobilized group of fundamentalist that will support any policy as long as it is done under a banner of religion, patriotism, and mythical 1940s standards of morality. It just so happens that about 50% of our politicians are unscrupulous enough, or smart enough, to cater to this 25%. While at the same time ignoring them. The other 50% of Americna politicians is split into two groups. 49% being worthless assholes who know all the above is bullshit, but are too afraid of public scorn to do anything about it. The other 1% is the extreme fringe that see’s what is going on, and actively tries to fight it regardless of political fallout.

The point, you ask? Even if we elect a rational president, there are 530+ congresspeople and an entrie Supreme Court to stop rational policy.

[Wobbly]

@Mastriani

I hope the US leaves IRaq, if only to show the liberals exactly whats going to happen then.

Although I understand why you say this, ideologically, it is the last thing that you actually want to happen.

It would cause a war of rather cataclysmic proportions. Plainly, all the noise by the Democrats, is so much lip service to a sector of constituents who are bereft of knowledge of not only the Middle East dynamics, but the effects of warfare and creating a vacuum.

Yes yes, and instead we continue a war that is, by many estimates, unsustainable, and elect a president who publicly says that WMD were in Iraq, as was Al Qaeda, and refuses to accept that past American actions had adverse consequences in the form of a militarized Islam focusing it’s energy on U.S. interests. The question is, do we continue fighting a war that has no military victory, and is taking a severe economic toll on us, in an attempt to stave off the inevitable? No no, the inevitable is catastrophic, but it does not change the fact that it is inevitable.

[Maytacera]

@Zak

U.S. Citizens do not even have the constitutional right to vote in a Presidential Election. Why the hell should non-citizens?

…Explain this one?

[Phaedrus]

@Maytacera

@Zak

U.S. Citizens do not even have the constitutional right to vote in a Presidential Election. Why the hell should non-citizens?

…Explain this one?

The US uses a system called the Electoral College. When we go to the polls, we cast what’s called the “popular vote.” In theory, those we chose to vote in our stead (ie the Electors) will cast their votes based on the popular vote. And this is usually what happens. But it’s not a guarentee- once selected, an Elector may cast their Electoral Vote for any candidate they like. While they normally follow the will of The People, the Constitution doesn’t specifically require them to. The only real recourse the voters have is pick a more trustworthy Elector the next time.

The Electoral College system was set up back in a time when a direct popular vote was not really technologically feasible. Plus, the Founding Fathers felt that the People would be too fickle, spending their votes frivously upon whomever made the slickest promises. Bear in mind literacy was fairly low and most of those voting would never have met a candidate for President. And of course there were no TV ads back then.

A final (and much better reason) for the Electoral College system is that it gives smaller states a much larger voice than they’d have in a direct vote, keeping large population centers like L.A. & NY from dictating policy to the rest of the nations. I feel that’s why the system endures. Well, that and because it would take a Constitutional Amendment to change it; that’s not something Congress takes lightly. Any time you open Pandora’s Box, the possiblity exists to much around with stuff you never intended to have monkeyed with.

[Maytacera]

Huh. Alright. I’m not a native to the U.S, and may abstain from voting in my first election simply due to the fact that I have yet to learn just what the hell is going on here.

[Bishop_Hammer]

@gregory

I think every citizen of any country who has been affected by US foreign policy should have the right to vote for the next US President.
For example, it hardly seems fair that the US can intrude into Iraq, set up what is essentially a puppet government (catering to every US whim), and then deny ordinary Iraqis the right to vote in the new elections.

Iraqis citizens were not denied the right to vote in their countries election. In fact many risked their lives and saftey to vote in it. For many of them it was probably the first time they ever had a chance to vote in a real election as opposed to a BS facade of having a choice which is what Saddam gave them.

The American people did not tell Iraq’s citizens who they could vote for and had no say in who their leaders would be. There is absolutely no reason they should be able to do it to the American people.