You Don't Always Vote in the Election You Want. You Vote in the Election You Have

Or so it appears from the message we're considering sending to Iraq. With the pressures of getting the Worst President Ever elected back into office no longer shaping every decision and statement, it appears that the some folks in the Bush administration have decided to briefly set down the crack pipe and begin experimenting with some sort of reality inducing drugs. In this case, it looks as if they could seriously be considering the possibility that we might be facing a civil war after the Iraq elections in January. (They aren't yet ready to concede that we're already fighting a civil war for the Kurds and Shiites, but sometimes you have to be happy with baby steps.)

In today's Times, we find the following gem:

The Bush administration is talking to Iraqi leaders about guaranteeing Sunni Arabs a certain number of ministries or high-level jobs in the future Iraqi government if, as is widely predicted, Sunni candidates fail to do well in Iraq's elections. An even more radical step, one that a Western diplomat said was raised already with an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, is the possibility of adding some of the top vote-getters among the Sunni candidates to the 275-member legislature, even if they lose to non-Sunni candidates.

Oh really? So it would appear that, assuming we can't get the best possible outcome in the "free Iraqi elections", perhaps we can just rig the election to get a more desirable result? (I know... many of you are shocked that the Bushies would jump on such a strategy. Try to be strong.)

One of the chief fears concerning these elections has been that the Sunni and the Kurds might not want to accept the results as legitimate if the majority Shiites sweep the ballots. Our solution? Let's make sure that nobody thinks they are legitimate by making the majority angry as well. Hey... if nothing else this is certainly equality at its finest. If everyone is unhappy with the election results, nobody feels left out.

Courtesy of Memeoradndum, we find a few more people commenting on this.

Surprisingly, Cori Dauber agrees with this suggestion.

Kevin Drum sees the cracks in the armor of this plan. "It's the same story over and over and over again, isn't it? By the time the Bushies finally figure something out, it's too late to do anything about it. At this point, if they let the Shiites win all the seats it's a disaster, but if they arbitrarily take away some of their seats and award them to the Sunnis instead, that's a disaster too."

Max Speak thinks that the forced minority representation could be best applied in other areas. "But letting bygones be bygones, we look forward to application of this newfound concern for minority representation to other polities struggling towards democracy. Texas, for instance."