Wednesday, January 26, 2005
VOTERS DECIDE: BAD OR WORSE
Via Jeff Jarvis, an inspiring Iraqi election ad:
An old man rounding a corner into an alleyway looks up and sees young, masked militants facing him down. A couple joins the old man. Slowly, more and more people join the old man.
Voiceover: On January 30, we meet our destiny and our duty. We are not alone, and we are not afraid. Our strength is in our unity; together we will work and together prevail.
Those joining the man now outnumber the militants. He nods and they move forward. The militants run away.
Written on screen: Don’t worry about Iraq. We are its people. We will allow no one to deprive us of our rights. For the building of Iraq: Peace, freedom and democracy. The heroes of Iraq.
Sounds good, yes? But not to Paul McGeough:
They are unlikely to vote in the right numbers to legitimise this process. This election will do nothing - things will stay bad or get worse.
True to form, the Americans and the puppet regime they have installed are cooking the books ...
... the likely effect in a tribal and religious society is the outcome the Americans didn’t want - many voters will resort to religious and tribal edicts, decrees and urgings on how they should vote, thereby locking in Iraq’s sectarian divide and perhaps setting the scene for the full-blown civil war that some observers now fear is inevitable.
Like the inevitable disasters many anticipated during Afghanistan’s elections (McGeough: “Today’s voting goes ahead amid promised Taliban and al-Qaeda attacks on polling stations ... â€?), after which McGeough wrote:
Encouraged by the turnout and the surprising lack of violence ...
As John Podhoretz notes, some folks just don’t want the elections to succeed:
Anti-Bush partisans — both Democrats and Leftist ideologues — understand that if the elections are seen as a triumph, they will be seen as Bush’s triumph, and they cannot stomach it ... Maybe what they’re really pessimistic about isn’t Iraq’s future but their own.
Speaking of McGeough, who is of Irish birth, he once vowed to never take out Australian citizenship until we became a republic. Yesterday more than 12,000 other immigrants demonstrated that they don’t share McGeough’s concerns. Paul won’t be joining them any time soon:
Republicans will keep pushing for an independent head of state even though a poll shows support for a republic is at a five-year low.