Today, Iraqis get to vote. They were beaten, murdered, gassed, starved, raped, looted, and tyrannized by a dictator for fifty years, and by kings and tyrants before that for all time in memory. But today they get to vote.
Regardless of your short-term petty political bickering about Bush, he’s the one who got this ball rolling. Today a people gets to choose its government, because America looked to its own interests, and found those interests to be the same as the Iraqi people: freedom.
A small minority wants to blow them up for voting; those in that minority has only violence and blood, not freedom, on their minds. That’s not going to stop the vast majority who want freedom; they will vote, not in spite of, but because of the danger that minority represents.
It’s a good day. Break out the cigars, and hail: “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”
Yes it was and still is a good day. Let us learn from the past and note that George H. W. Bush was the primary proponent of Saddam Hussein as the vice president under Ronald Reagan. Hussein was installed by the CIA under Kennedy’s watch to provide a buffer against the communists. His previous job was as a hired assassin – we knew what we were getting into back then. Bush was the director of the CIA under Nixon, he has to have been aware of Hussein’s past, because he was very good at his job. Of course, he only liked Hussein as the lesser of two evils (Iran being the greater), but the Reagan administration made the fatal mistake of heavily supporting both Iran and Iraq, depending on the political climate, with military support, even after Hussein used “weapons of mass destruction” on the Kurds.
Yes, it is a happy day, but it’s 40 years too late for many. The lesson to be learned is that neither Kennedy nor Bush had the foresight to see that supporting an evil man is intrinsically evil. In related news, it was the uber-liberal FDR who initiated the “Oil for Peace” deal with the Saudis that has directly led to the heavy funding available to middle-eastern (translate: Saudi) terrorists.
It seems neither Republicans nor Democrats have a monopoly on decisions with far-reaching negative consequences.
Let us learn from our mistakes so that one day we might not have to go through an unnecessary hell just to get back to purgatory.
Greg, I completely agree on every point. Allies-of-the-moment may be useful for the moment, but choosing the lesser evil always results in more evil. Let’s hope that this act of liberation, although “40 years too late” for hundreds of thousands, will be just in time for hundreds of millions over the next 100 years.
I’t seems to me that even smart people in western culture in many cases have a simplistic view of the world. We took down dictator Saddam = everything is dandy. Come on guys :P. OK, by now you probably have seen that the world isn’t such a simple place where everybody shares the same ideas.
A few months ago a Swedish minister (a woman) and a muslim preast (in Sweden) had a meeting. It wasn’t properly set up, so when they met under the spotlight (press and cameras) the preast decided NOT to shake the ministers hand when she tried to. Thats because he does’nt consider women as worthy of that. Like it or not, majority of people in muslim countries feel this way (also in Iraq).
Now if you try to hold true democracy in those countries – you most likely will get a result that does’nt please western point of view. I’m not even getting in to the ethnic situation in Iraq (people up there just LIKE to blow each other up on religious grounds). So please stop your hails – you don’t know exactly what you are hailing for.
Paul M. Jones – I also wanted to thank you for Savant. This little beast is taking PHP where no scripting language is gone before :). I’m actually migrating to it from Smarty, because Smarty is bs. when it comes to programming ERP level software. Actually I keep asking myself what tha heck are people thinking when using Smarty over Savant. Probably the same that I was thinking three years ago :P.