David Brooks: Iraq elections should follow the El Salvador model

[Cocoa]

how can one respond to an argument like this? Emulating El Salvador?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/opinion/28brooks.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Conditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third of the nation's territory. Just before election day, the insurgents stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace, staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools that were to be polling places.

Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station. The people scattered, then the line reformed. "This nation may be falling apart," one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, "but by voting we may help to hold it together."

Conditions were scarcely better in 1984, when Salvadorans got to vote again. Nearly a fifth of the municipalities were not able to participate in the elections because they were under guerrilla control. The insurgents mined the roads to cut off bus service to 40 percent of the country. Twenty bombs were planted around the town of San Miguel. Once again, people voted with the sound of howitzers in the background.

Yet these elections proved how resilient democracy is, how even in the most chaotic circumstances, meaningful elections can be held.

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[Demit]

1. Yeah, and he thought they shouldn't have held the election in Spain

after the Madrid attack. That guy doesn't even remember his own columns.

Presumably his contradictory stance stems from whether the election result will be favorable to his side. That's David Brooks's idea of democracy.