My dad's hobby was building radios, so we had a basement full of parts.

Fat brown plastic knobs and tiny metal switches that made a satisfying click when they were toggled. Tubes — radios had tubes then. There were coils of colorful wire, bundles of antennae and the occasional meter with a wobbly needle that measured ohms or watts or decibels.

My little brother and I were never sure what those meters measured because we were kids, not electrical engineers. That didn't stop us from making radios: random parts stuck onto cigar boxes.

Butch would display our latest contraption, solemnly turning a dial, flipping a switch, fussing with the antenna.

I hid in the hallway. When he tipped me the wink, I'd mouth a few meticulously rehearsed static noises, then sing. "Davy, Davy Crockett," or "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog, crrrrrying all the time."

"Aw, the kids have made a radio," my mother would coo. "I wonder if you can get 'How Much is That Doggie in the Window.' I love that song."

We'd cheerfully oblige. Butch would twiddle a dial, I'd spit more static and start crooning the new tune.

It was a sweet suburban scene, a carefully maintained fiction that the children made a radio. But we all knew that it was just a cigar box with knobs stuck onto it. Not a radio at all.

The recent elections in Iraq reminded me of those radio days. Not really an election at all. Just an empty box with some knobs stuck onto it.

How did we convince the world that an election held in a country occupied by a foreign power connotes democracy? This is impossible: a country cannot be occupied and democratic.

The United States still controls the Iraqi media, the roads and transportation and, perhaps most important, administers the reconstruction money and awards the contracts.

Iraqis may hold office and have impressive titles, but it will still be the United States that holds the purse strings on the $24 billion in reconstruction money needed to rebuild the country's collapsed infrastructure.

You tell me: Who will be running Iraq?

By most counts, only 14,000 Iraqi security forces are trained, and most of them are incapable of operating without direct U.S. supervision. We are the ones with the guns, and yet we have the nerve to use terms like liberty, freedom and democracy.

How did we convince the world that there could be a democracy when a substantial minority — the Sunni, about 20 percent of the population — faced insurmountable barriers to voting, such as closed polling places and a shortage of ballots?

Sunni clerics called for a boycott of the election, claiming that an election held under foreign occupation was not legitimate and should have been delayed until the U.S.-led coalition was off Iraqi soil.

Strange as it might seem, it is in U.S. interests to have an unstable Iraq: Sunnis mistrustful of Shiites' rise to power, Shiites suspicious of Sunnis, Kurds still longing for independence.

As long as Iraqis are fighting each other, a U.S. presence will be grudgingly accepted as a stabilizing force. The Bush administration has no objection to keeping a large military presence perched over the world's second largest oil reserve in a position to dominate the entire Middle East.

It would have made more sense to stabilize the country and defer elections until everyone could vote and the legitimacy of the election could not be challenged.

But if the Iraqis ever got their act together U.S. forces would get the boot, and that doesn't fit in with the Bush plan at all.

This is not to call into question the courage, optimism and resilience of the millions of Iraqis who did face the bombs and bullets to vote. But if they thought they were voting for democracy, liberty and freedom they are sadly mistaken. They risked their lives to legitimize the Bush administration's long-term plans for domination of the Middle East.

It may sound like freedom and look like liberty, but Iraqi democracy is just an empty box with a ventriloquist hidden in the hallway singing the same old songs.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.