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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (217415)	2/4/2005 3:10:16 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1570913

Iraq kudos misplaced By Ibrahim Kazerooni Guest Commentary Deprived of promised security, reliable electricity, jobs, proper sewage treatment, water and gasoline, the Iraqi people took charge in Sunday's election after nearly two years of disastrous and incompetent mismanagement of their country by the Bush White House. While the Bush administration and the mainstream American media lather themselves in congratulatory self-adulation over the election, let us not forget that it was the threat of full-scale, armed rebellion from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Shiite community that brought about Sunday's direct election. "Al-Sistani, the country's most influential Shiite leader, has rejected a U.S. formula for transferring power through a provisional legislature selected by 18 regional caucuses, insisting on direct elections instead," according to an Associated Press report from more than a year ago. The original White House plan was to appoint a constitutional assembly made up of members selected by U.S.-approved committees in regional districts. Seemingly, we have forgotten the hundreds of thousands of Shiites who protested this plan last year in Baghdad and Basra, chanting, "No, no to America! Yes, yes to al-Sistani!" It was only after the White House realized that al-Sistani and the Shiite community were prepared to follow through on their threat that President Bush grudgingly acquiesced to repeated Shiite demands for early, direct elections. Yet, in the same alternate reality that gave us phantom WMDs, bogus Iraqi ties to Sept. 11 and a war that was supposed to cost only $60 billion, the Bush administration and the mainstream media now would have us believe the election was the exclusive work of George Bush. Demanded by, designed by and managed by Iraqis, Sunday's election showed us that the Iraqi people are far more competent at managing their country's affairs than the Bush administration is. But we must keep in mind that the media-generated halo around Bush's crown will not illuminate Iraqis' electricity-starved homes. Because the Iraqis have come to believe the election will solve their problems, we can expect rebellion from an even wider cross-section of the populace if their day-to-day living conditions do not improve significantly - and soon. Without exception, the Iraqis I talked to inside and outside Iraq saw voting in Sunday's election as, first and foremost, a vote for the immediate withdrawal of occupation forces and, second, a vote to take control of their day-to-day lives, which have only worsened as a result of the White House's incompetent mismanagement of Iraq. Electricity remains intermittent; unemployment hovers over 40 percent; security is limited; clean water is irregular; and gasoline is scarce in a country that sits on top of the world's second-largest oil reserves. Iraqis' patience is wearing thin with foreign forces they see not as liberators but as occupiers intent on starving the country of its resources. Unless we provide clear and verifiable evidence that occupation forces intend to leave Iraq completely (no American bases left behind), Iraqi suspicions about our intentions will only increase as their daily lives remain miserable or deteriorate. President Bush's recent pronouncements that we must stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future could cause Iraq's Shiites to rise up and remove us by force, as they did the British in the first part of the last century. A poignant reminder as to why the Bush administration and the mainstream media should be judicious about how they spin Sunday's election, I close with the opening paragraphs of an article from the Sept. 4, 1967, edition of The New York Times: "United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. "According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong." We all know how that story ended. Ibrahim Kazerooni is a Shiite imam who was a dissident in Iraq and fled in 1974 after being repeatedly imprisoned and tortured by the Baathist regime. He currently is director of the Abrahamic Initiative at St. John's Cathedral in Denver. denverpost.com