More on Brooks' Assertions about Democracy

The earlier post was written in haste while I was at work, and I'd like to take a few minutes here to get into more detail about the El Salvadoran Civil War and the US role in perpetuating it. David Brooks is being at best fanciful, but more realistically dishonest in his portrayal of elections as being the defining means by which the Leftist insurgency was defeated.

The first thing that Brooks does not make clear is that 1982 did not mark the beginning of El Salvador's electoral process. Salvadoran democracy goes back a long way, but it has been plagued by corruption and fraud. Military coups and juntas further diluted effective democracy, though populist (i.e., leftist; i.e., communist, in the parlance of the day) groups did agitate for additional participation.

This is not Iraq's tradition. El Salvador had a presidential election in 1977, followed by a military takeover, followed by the long-marginalized left opting for war. Iraq's recent history bears no relation.

The civil war of 1980-1992 was punctuated by elections, it's true. It was also exacerbated by Ronald Reagan's policy of stamping out communism wherever it lived. This has merits, let's not even pretend it doesn't, but the 75,000 dead Salvadorans and the congresspeople who were lied to in order to get them to approve funding might find that the methods were inexcusable.

El Salvador had a reasonably democratic tradition prior to the 1982 election that Brooks claims was the origin of a society's defeat of an unwanted leftist insurgency. He's misrepresenting the situation. While elections are undeniably a good thing, what got El Salvador into its civil war in the first place was the lack of legitimacy stemming from having merely a reasonably democratic tradition. This is what the neocons should be studying while they prepare Iraq for fraudulent and inadequate polls in January: not the dignity of casting a ballot, but the dignity of having your vote count.