Recent days have brought many reports of protests in Iraq, where there are people who have cause to believe that the latest election in their country was rigged.

Somebody should explain the situation to these poor, deluded souls.

Definitions of democracy vary.

Progressive and enlightened people tend to believe that only a representational democracy is a true democracy. Others believe that a society run by mob rule deserves to be called a democracy. Variations pertain to those, and other definitions of democracy.

Disagreements over the definition of democracy, though, are separate from considerations of whether an election was rigged.

However, as regards both the form of their democracy and the question of whether the election was rigged, Iraqis must keep in mind that “democracy” has been imported to them by George W. Bush.

It’s beyond all dispute that Bush did not have a majority of the popular vote in 2000. The Supreme Court decision to stop the vote recount that year in Florida was spearheaded by Antonin Scalia, a close personal friend of Dick Cheney. Following Bush’s seizure of power, many Republicans argued for their positions against Democrats, not by logically defending their positions but by saying “You just can’t accept that you lost the election, can you?”

Present-day Iraqis should realize that “democracy” has been brought to them by people who don’t really give a hoot and a holler about democracy. For a historical parallel to their current situation, the Iraqis might have a look at Russia’s appropriation of the Eastern European countries after World War II. The official line was that Russia was going to protect those countries from the alleged horrors of capitalism. In reality, though, Russia was colonizing those countries, in order to gain economic advantages it wouldn’t have had without them. The capacity of the communist model for success, of course, has since been resoundingly demonstrated. Each Eastern-bloc country had its own government, free to do as it pleased so long as it stuck to the Soviet line. Today’s Iraqis are free to determine the fate of their own governmental institutions and by extension, that of their territories, so long as they do not question the oil Production Sharing Agreements arranged for by, what a surprising coincidence, those same Iraqi officials said to have benefited from cheating in the voting process and the vote count.