It’s a strange view of democracy. According to The Sunday Telegraph, the British Ministry of Defense recently conducted a private poll of Iraqis’ views of the war. If the leaked poll results are accurate, it would raise serious questions about the occupation and strengthen the case for immediate withdrawal, which now has majority support.

According to the poll – the accuracy of which Prime Minister Tony Blair has refused to contest – the occupation forces are decidedly unpopular. A whopping 82 percent of respondents are “strongly opposed” to the occupation. Numbers this high are rarely seen in politics and should be repeated: 82 percent of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the occupation.

With such deep opposition to our troops, combined with majority support for immediate withdrawal here in the United States, what part of the military occupation is rooted in democracy?

The poll also found popular support for attacks against our troops. A full 45 percent believe attacks against British and U.S. forces are justified. That’s almost half of the country. That’s an enormous number of people, planted right in the middle of conflict, condoning or supporting attacks against coalition forces.

At what point will the rest of the United States want to bring our troops home?

Finally, less than 1 percent believe that coalition troops are responsible for many improvements in security.

These poll figures mark a decline since January of this year, when Zogby International found similar discontent. In that poll, 82 percent of Sunni Arabs and 69 percent of Shiites favored a U.S. withdrawal “immediately or after an elected government is in place.” Nine months later, it appears that Iraqi sentiment has hardened.

Does it make sense for politicians to be nurturing democracy through anti-democratic means? It doesn’t add up, but it’s nothing new. Before all this election business, the Bush administration was refusing to even hold them – wanting instead to hand-pick a government of its own choosing. What is democratic about that? The plan failed, however, when Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful person in Iraq, demanded elections. Shiites marched in huge swells, and the occupation had no choice but to submit and conduct a national vote. The election held in January was never meant to happen.

From the beginning, the war has been waged on anti-democratic terms. These are not isolated inconsistencies, but rather are expressions of an anti-democratic war as engineered by its planners.

At possibly the most passive end is the government propaganda, such as the dramatic and choreographed “rescue” of U.S. soldier Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital that treated her for wounds suffered after thrown from a moving Humvee. The staged “rescue” was recorded to video by U.S. troops and released to the public to garner support for the occupation. What kind of government uses propaganda?

Then there is the obvious problem of war crimes, iconified at Abu Ghraib prison. What kind of liberators sodomize detainees with chemical lights, as described in General Taguba’s report on prisoner abuse?

What kind of respect for human rights is in a mission where Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has described the Geneva Convention as “quaint?” What kind of democratic framework guides the president, whose press secretary declares torture serves an important presidential function?

No wonder Iraqis want the occupation out of their country. Rather than continuing to force an occupation on a resistant population, why not take the democratic route and let the population of the United States and Iraq decide?

– Nicolai Brown is a senior in linguistics from Okoboji.