Quote:
Originally posted by HOZ@Feb 3 2005, 04:28 PM
Reasons sucked, planning sucked...but the results are so far......good! 
Then there is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This Charles-Manson-with-a-turban who heads the insurgency in Iraq had a bad hair day on Sunday. I wonder whether anyone told him about the suicide bomber who managed to blow up only himself outside a Baghdad polling station and how Iraqi voters walked around his body, spitting on it as they went by.
It's about time, because whatever you thought about this war, it's not about Mr. Bush any more. It's about the aspirations of the Iraqi majority to build an alternative to Saddamism. By voting the way they did, in the face of real danger, Iraqis have earned the right to ask everyone now to put aside their squabbles and focus on what is no longer just a pipe dream but a real opportunity to implant decent, consensual government in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.
A day to Remember
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He's surely right in that _if_ the Iraqi people in the majority want a Western-style democratic government... that's a good thing from our perspective. However, if the insurgency continues, then I don't see how the majority wanting peace will make much of a difference. As long as its basically impossible for me to open my Starbucks in Falluja (cause I assume I'd be literal toast w/in a month) then victory is still a looong way away, and by _no_ means certain.
Of course, South Vietnam was a democracy as well, no? With people voting and embracing democracy? That didn't turn out too well...
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- 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.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
Sounds like we've heard this kind of talk before. Should be an interesting story.