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Sunday, January 30, 2005
Why Not Just Come Right Out And Root For The Terrorists?
Nearly 22 months after American troops captured Baghdad, lighting a fire of enthusiasm for the freedoms Iraqis had craved so long, it is a measure of how much has gone wrong that Iraqis committed to Western-style democratic ideals can differ so sharply over the best way to secure them. Much of the problem is that the elections are being held under the dominion of the United States.
"Under the dominion of the United States" -- ? To the best of your Curmudgeon's knowledge, all American forces and support personnel are doing with regard to the polling is providing physical security. What conditions has the U.S. imposed upon the elections?
Many Iraqis, interviews in recent months have shown, do not accept that fundamental choices about the shape of their future political system should be made by a foreign power, particularly one they regard as a harbinger of secular, materialistic values far removed from the Muslim world's.
What "fundamental choices" does the writer have in mind? Anything more specific than that the country not be ruled by a megalomaniacal warlord who had dissidents fed into plastic shredders, and whose sons roved his capital city selecting unwilling concubines each night?
But questions over the election go far beyond the American stewardship, to issues that touch on whether it was ever wise or realistic to think that Jeffersonian-style democracy, with its elaborate checks on power and guarantees for minority rights, could be implanted, at least so rapidly, in a country and a region that has little experience with anything but winner-take-all politics.
It seems that the writer is here suggesting that "American stewardship" should not have released sovereignty to the Iraqis quite so soon -- that we ought to have taken up the "white man's burden" and slowly, carefully conditioned the Iraqis to the principles of freedom. The alternative is that the writer means us to conclude that, having freed Iraq from Baathist totalitarian savagery, we ought to have withdrawn at once and allowed it to lapse into Iranian-style Islamist totalitarian savagery, where women are stoned to death for having been raped and little boys are whipped to death for breaking the Ramadan fast.
Compounding those objections, the elections are being held in the grip of a paralyzing fear that many Iraqis see as inconsistent with a free vote. A savage insurgency, and the harsh measures America's 150,000 troops have taken in response, have angered and terrified Iraqis, who now face election conditions that have made an obstacle course of the process, at every stage.
But to have delayed the election because of the terrorist threat would have said clearly that the terrorists hold the whip hand -- that as long as they present a credible threat to the security of voters, the Iraqis would not be permitted to choose their own representatives and executives. Given that the projected turnout for this election is higher than that for the 2004 American national elections, the assertion that Iraqis are "angered" or "terrified" by the status quo, which is objectively far less lethal than the rule of Saddam Hussein, is fatuous. As for "the harsh measures America's 150,000 troops have taken in response," does the writer think terrorists who deliberately target civilians are likely to be defeated by diplomacy?
The Times used to have better sense than this. It has shed all pretense to serious journalism and is now an openly advocacy publication. That its advocacy is diametrically opposed to freedom comes as little surprise.
UPDATE: FOX News has just reported that, according to Adel al-Lami of the Independent Electoral Commission, 72 percent of eligible Iraqis participated in the voting. The report also gives the toll taken by terrorist violence: 36 deaths tallied to date.
No one should be eager to depreciate the lives lost in this historic event. Still, your Curmudgeon is irresistibly moved to say: If that's the worst the terrorists can do, the Iraqi people have won their freedom.
Keep a good grip on it, Iraqi friends.
Comments
I cannot help but wonder how many people in America died during the same period due to violence suffered due to such momentous events as “he be tryin’ to deal sh*t on MY corner” and “gimme tha money or I’ll cap yo’ a**! or other such occasions of geo-political import.
But no, the MSM will ignore any hint of success of the election in its mad attempt to discredit George Bush, and they’ll do it while stepping over the corpses of dead Americans and Iraqis.
Posted by mostly cajun on 01/30/2005 at 12:33 PMmaybe if they all voted for John Kerry the Times would be more disposed towards them
Posted by akaky on 01/30/2005 at 03:29 PM
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