http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060122/focus/focus1.html
Published: Sunday | January 22, 2006

DEMOCRACY IS faith in collective common sense. It's a belief that fickle and short-sighted individuals will be wise en masse.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried," goes the famous Churchill cliché. But he also remarked that, "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

Intelligence and honesty are optional for political success, but egotism and a lack of principles are indispensable. The public everywhere loves to rail against 'cynical, unscrupulous and uncaring politicians'. But those are the types it keeps voting into power. The candidate who tells the biggest lies most convincingly usually wins. Look how draft dodger, hawkish Dubya Bush convinced America he was a 'Warrior President'.

The unvarnished truth is the surest formula for political defeat. Can you imagine a Jamaican prime ministerial candidate declaring thus to cheering throngs? "If elected, I will end all patronage and stop giving contracts to those with party connections ­ so don't expect any handouts from me if our side wins. Furthermore, the nation is mired in debt because you people are living beyond your means and you need to cut back on the cellphones and 'bling' and spend more of the remittances your hard-working relatives abroad send you on your children's education. And we wouldn't have such a high crime rate if you men would stop being just breeders and become actively involved fathers and only have children you can support." Such an orator wouldn't win a seat.

No matter what the political system, it's always the same type of bombastic, self-aggrandising blowhards who dominate the process. When the Iron Curtain fell, many former communist leaders simply rebranded themselves and waited their time, and eventually got voted back into power by the same public that chased them out at bayonet point a few years back.

POLITICAL COMEDY

Take the Ukraine today. Little over a year ago, 'Orange Revolution' mass protests over his rigged election forced Viktor Yanukovich to resign in disgrace. Now his party is expected to win the most seats in the upcoming parliamentary elections. While the party of his successor, the then ecstatically acclaimed 'saviour' Victor Yushchenko, has been discredited by scandals and economic decline, and now trails badly in third place with a 13 per cent rating. Say what you will about democracy, it's seldom less than entertaining -at least when viewed from afar.

Our local People's National Party (PNP) leadership campaign is also providing grand comedy. Can anything be more hilarious than to hear decade-long senior Cabinet members promising a 'prosperous, well-educated, corruption and crime-free Jamaica' if they become Prime Minister? Because, in essence, their arguments amount to, "The country is at present broke, poorly schooled and murder-plagued, and I as a senior minister helped make it that way. But put me in charge and you will see a miraculous turnaround, because I say so."

So who were the Security and Finance and Local Government ministers that presided over record homicide rates and double-digit inflation and miniscule growth and rampant National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) corruption and eaten-away roads? Well, Peter and Omar and Portia and Shaggy all agree, "It wasn't me!"

GUTLESS VOTERS

Any self-respecting electorate would be insulted by this load of horse dung and chuck out wholesale at the earliest opportunity whichever of this bunch of jokers comes out on top. But the only thing more shameless than democratically chosen representatives is the people who vote them into power.

Under Michael Manley in the 1970s, the Jamaican per capita income plummeted and for the first time our murder rate surpassed America's. Not surprisingly, fed up voters booted him out in 1980. But nine years later the former kareeba-wearing, fire-breathing socialist reinvented himself as a management studies cliché-spouting, jacket-and-tie pragmatist and again became the people's choice. A few years ago a poll asked, "Which Prime Minister has done the most for the welfare of Jamaica?" Fifty-five per cent named Manley. While Hugh Shearer, who led the Jamaican economy to as yet unrecaptured economic heights, polled one per cent. And people wonder why politicians have such cynical contempt for voters.

MIDDLE EAST DEMOCRACY

But democracy is not always fun and jokes. And events in Iran are showing its deadly serious side. For president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - whose election more or less reflected the will of the people - has called the Holocaust a 'myth' and declared Israel a 'disgraceful blot' to be wiped 'off the map'. And he seems set on developing nuclear weapons which can do the job. He has broken United Nations seals on Iranian nuclear plants, in effect declaring Iran's intention to build a nuclear bomb regardless of what the so-called 'international community' ­ i.e., the United States and European Union ­ has to say on the matter.

It's hard to judge the public opinion of a country without a free press. But by all reports, the majority of Iranians seem to share his anti-Israeli and pro-nuclear stances.

The irony is that outside Israel and Lebanon, Iran is the most democratic country in the Middle East - if Iraq ever settles down, its democracy will probably be similarly theocratic and nationalistic. And from a strict 'one law for all' point of view, it's hard to see why Iran doesn't have as much as a right to nuclear weapons as the U.S. or Pakistan or Israel.

Yet, the possession of nuclear weapons by an unstable country like Iran is a clear recipe for anarchy in the Middle East, where most of the world's oil is located. Any serious dislocation in this region could result in $100 or $200 a barrel crude, and wreak economic chaos.

So logic and morality argue one thing. But self-interest, at least for the west, argues another. Should Iran be allowed to decide its own destiny? Or should its crazy - though democratically elected - Islamic extremists be roped in before they ruin the world economy?

That assumes, of course, they can be roped in. Because by his stupid decision to invade Iraq, that incompetent moron Bush has exposed the U.S. as a paper tiger. It's already the biggest debtor nation in world history and is basically occupying Iraq on a credit card. Another such war would surely cause either massive inflation or a dollar implosion, or both.

Furthermore, the all volunteer army of the 'world's only global super power' is clearly too small to pacify a relatively small country of 25 million people like Iraq, much less impose its will on the planet. But most fighting-age American men are mainly interested in partying and want nothing to do with war - who can envision a 'bring back the draft' presidential candidate getting elected? While the mass of young Iraqis and Iranians have shown a frightening willingness to die for their cause.

But then, unlike American deriding western Europe, the U.S. at least has a feared military force. A U.N. threat to invade Iran if it doesn't comply with international nuclear regulations would cause even the grey-bearded mullahs to burst out laughing - 'You and what army?' The West's only realistic nuclear prevention plan may be for the U.S. or its ally Israel to bomb Iran's widely scattered nuclear plants.

That's a pretty scary option that might open any number of Pandora's boxes. Oil prices would shoot into the stratosphere, the Iraqi Shi'ite majority would turn wholesale on the occupying American army, anti-western upheavals would wrack the entire Middle East - and that's not even figuring in what China or Russia would do. But might even this be a less frightening alternative than a fully-nuclear-armed-and-ready-to-launch Iran a few years down the road?

Frankly, the prospects all look bleak. Maybe we in the comfortable west - and that includes car-and-cellphone-awash Jamaica - better enjoy the good life while we can. The future may not be as easy for these parts as the last 60 years have been.