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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (95347)	1/31/2005 3:56:40 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

"One election does not a democracy make" Funny, that line. And predictable, too. The New Iraq January 31, 2005; Page A18 online.wsj.com The world won't know for a week or longer which candidates won yesterday's historic Iraq elections, but we already know the losers: The insurgents. The millions of Iraqis who defied threats and suicide bombers to cast a ballot yesterday showed once and for all that the killers do not represent some broad "nationalist" resistance. The true Iraqi patriots are those who risked their lives to vote, apparently in much larger numbers than anticipated. "I would have crawled here if I had to," 32-year-old Samir Hassan, who lost a leg in a car-bomb blast last year, told Reuters. "I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me." Yesterday's coverage on TV and in print was full of similar comments from Iraqis -- which is especially notable since so much of the Western press has been anticipating a much worse outcome. (See an Iraqi blogger's eye-witness account.) The early estimate of a 72% turnout made by Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission was later reduced to a little more than 60%, or about eight million of the nearly 14 million registered voters. That would still put turnout at roughly the same as America's vote last November, which was the highest in the U.S. since 1968 and took place without any risk of being shot by a sniper or blown up by a car bomb. Another quarter of a million Iraqi exiles also voted, or 90% of those who registered. The result is also a credit to the American and Coalition forces who provided security, at the painful cost of more lives. Protecting 5,000 polling places was a monumental task, and it is significant that terrorist attacks were largely unsuccessful. In the Shiite-dominated south and the Kurdish north, the voting took place with little violence. And even in such restive Sunni areas as Mosul and Baquba, turnout was notable. If other Sunni areas didn't vote in large numbers, the reason was as much insurgent intimidation as any general boycott. The election shows that most of Iraq is not in "chaos" and that the insurgents remain an unpopular minority rejected by most Iraqis. In the days before the vote, in fact, three more key members of the terror network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were rounded up, following the recent capture of a major deputy. No one thinks that yesterday's voting means the end of the insurgency. The remnants of Saddam's intelligence services and the Saddam Fedayeen who are behind most of the terrorism can't allow self-government to take root because it means the end of their political dominance; they still must be destroyed. However, from now on the Baathist insurgents and their foreign-born allies will be attacking not American "occupiers" but a newly elected and legitimate Iraqi government. All of this certainly gives a whole new meaning to that oft-heard phrase, "the Arab street." Yesterday's election was the most openly contested vote in modern times in an Arab state and will certainly be far freer than anything we will soon see in Egypt, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia. It's hard to tell what effect this will have on the authoritarian governments in those countries, but the positive reaction in some Arab quarters was already notable yesterday. "The new Iraq is born today," declared the Al-Ittihad daily in Abu Dhabi. And the Arab News in Saudi Arabia called the vote "a much needed victory for moderation" and "a very historic moment." U.S. diplomats should now be working overtime to make sure these countries assist the fledgling Iraq assembly as it works to write a constitution and establish its credibility around the world. Now that Iraqis have voted, the new line among American critics of the Iraq war is that "elections are not democracy." Well, elections may not be sufficient for democracy but they are necessary. Everyone knows that struggle and compromises lie ahead if the new Iraq is going to succeed. But yesterday's demonstration of courage and hope by millions of Iraqis belies those cynics who say Arabs and Muslims don't want democracy. As a certain American President said recently, the spread of freedom is essential to winning the war against terrorism. Some of America's leading lights scowled and said that Mr. Bush was "over-reaching"; yesterday, millions of Iraqis offered a more eloquent rebuttal.

To: Grainne who wrote (95347)	1/31/2005 4:10:23 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I'd be willing to bet that such a statue would stand unharmed considerably less time than Saddam's. Unless we put a guard on it. Consider such a proposition in America: we somehow get taken over by a dictatorial, despotic war monger who declares his own citizens to be enemy combatants and tortures them. Then, the Chinese unilaterally come in to restore democratic principles by bombing our cities, infrastructure and populace to pulp. The newly hired American puppets of the Chinese want to erect a monument to the leader of the Chinese who ordered the bombing? I don't think the Democrats or the Republicans (who don't like each other very much, BTW) would be able to stomach that. Put this statue in the middle of New York city, maybe Times Square. Sounds good to me! ;-) I had to put the smilie because someone would no doubt miss the ironic idiocy of the reciprocal tableau.

To: Grainne who wrote (95347)	1/31/2005 4:41:49 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

A gullible moron? Certainly describes the political opposition. But I can't decide whether more gullible or more moronic.

To: Grainne who wrote (95347)	1/31/2005 4:50:33 PM
From: Bill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Rather than reading that Guardian trash, why not get it from the horse's mouth? Message 21002384

To: Grainne who wrote (95347)	2/1/2005 8:50:08 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Right, elections don't make a democracy. Pinhead leftist judges do.