“If we caricature the political spectrum as equality-emphasizing on the left side and liberty-emphasizing on the right, Galloway is classic case of an extreme leftist. ”

IMHO, this goes beyond caricature; the past few years have clearly demonstrated that the right-hand 50% of US voters, at the least, are very happy giving up freedoms. They don’t even ask for good performance, in return.

”2) You can’t impose democracy in a region that has no history of it.
This means that the U.S. accomplished the impossible in setting up democratic Japan.”

The reason why the US can’t impose a democracic system in Iraq is because not enough people are willing to cooperate with the new system. Having a democratic history would have helped helps, but it’s not a necessary condition.

What makes a democracy function is not really the fact that the majority decides, rather that decisions taken by the majority are almost unanimously accepted. To derail a democracy it is more than enough if 1% of the population are willing to use violence to get their way. In Iraq there are tens of thousands of insurgents who are supported by many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The US has chosen to fight them. This will do little to get closer to the unanimous support you need in a democracy.

According to a recent poll, about 50% of the Iraqis think that attacks on US soldiers are lawful. Iraqis are thus not going to cooperate sufficiently with the US military or the Iraqi government to get rid of the insurgents. And as long as the insurgency is going on, you’ll have terrorists; if you want to make a bomb to blow up civilians, you should go to Al Anbar, because there you can make bombs without your neighbors asking questions.

So, perhaps one can say that bringing democracy to a country using the military doesn’t work if the military needs to use a lot of force after installing the new government.

George Galloway at the very least provided a silver lining to the results of election day, and proved that at the very least, British Democracy hasn’t completely become a forgone conclusion.

I’m certainly no fan of Blair. I think that he’s the most harmful PM we’ve had for a long time. Mind you, I’m pretty much on the conservative side, so I dislike his time in office for basically every reason going.

I am also under the impression that King was a pretty high profile Blair supporter on the backbenches, certainly (at least) the most so of the MPs of constituencies where Galloway might have a chance of winning.

I don’t think that Gorgeous George is renowned for his hard work on behalf of his constituents, although I may be doing him a disservice. The tabloids love to go on about the amount of time that he spends in his Iberian villa, but they love to hate him in any case. However, I’m not convinced that the role of the constituency PM is generally as important as the role they can play in Westminster on the wider scale; the UK legislative system doesn’t allow for the extraordinary porking-up of bills that can happen in the US system (which does have the merit of connecting local issues to national ones, even if it’s an expensive way to do it).

Also, I don’t think Oona King was picked out as a particularly egregious supporter of the war, more that she represented an appropriate constituency, but maybe you know more than me. (Slavish seems a bit too strong, but I guess she did support the war from the backbenches). I think perhaps her losing her seat to Galloway is more unfortunate than unfair.

Just to remind you: Blair is a seedy and devious trickster too.

-cvj

I think he’s a seedy and devious trickster to some extent, but I don’t think that he was elected so much for admiration of his ethics so much as his stance against Blair’s Iraq policy and that is a pretty justifiable use of one’s vote, I think.

It’s kind of like visiting the primate section of the zoo. Fascinating yet disturbing. Note that there, too, the amount of noise generated is inversely related to the intelligence of the specimen.