Election in Iraq

In the interests of killing time while waiting for Worlds, does anyone have an opinion about last month's Iraqi election?

The election itself went off better than I expected. A lot of people voted (a greater percentage than we get in the U.S., I believe), incidents of violence were not as bad as feared, and now some Sunni leaders are saying that they are willing to work within the system after all.

Do you think that this is a first step toward eventually establishing Western style democratic principles in the region?

Or do you thing that the overwhelming victory of the cleric-backed Shi-ite coalition is the first step down the slippery slope to an Islamic theocracy under the influence of fledgling nuclear power Iran? Maybe one day we will be wishing that we had good old Sadam Hussein back.

Mathman

No, I do not believe it is a step in the right direction. Sure, it's nice to see people voting and all that, but this was a totally foreign engineered action. People did not even know who they were voting for since the candidates were too afraid to have their names listed!

Now, the next think I am going to say will probably get me in trouble with the liberals on this board; actually, may be with conservatives as well; in any case, it's pretty cynical. I believe that the perfect situation in Iraq from the US perspective would have been modeled after Pakistan under Musharif. Despite all his faults, he is someone America can talk to, and does not trample over his people just for fun (he only does it out of fear for his power). Once I knew that the Iraq war was inevitable, I anticipated America would choose a US-friendly strongman general and install him as the head of the already-existing army, along with a heavily US-backed governement.

Now, we have basically no control over the situation. I guess Bush is just waiting for a moment of relative calm that will allow him to withrdaw troops with some semblence of dignity.

I was not surprised by the results, if that's what you mean. The Shiites have been the majority in Iraq since forever and they will move closer to their cousins in Iran in due course.

This whole exercise was for the good of the US interests in the oil holdings in the country. Soon the Kurds will be working directly with the Americans for business.

Look what happend to the democratically elected former President of Venezuela. He got ousted and the US didn't flinch because the new dictator deals with it for the oil business. The former Prez was anti US but so are other leaders but they have no oil.

Can you imagine the US going to war with Myamar to rid the dictator there? No oil and no one cares about natural rubber anymore.

The threat of terrorism has now been given been shot down the page of alerts because the main issue for Dubya is for Social Security. Hope we live for that.

And the beat goes on!

Joe

I wasn't happy with how the election was setup. People in the US were voting for a country they weren't even living in. They said all the politically correct things about how their country will be better when they go back, but how many of these people are actually planning on going back?

Some of the people I saw interviewed had been here for 10 years or more. I'm supposed to believe that they want to go back by now? That they're in this for the best interests of their country? Which country? A lot of them had kids that were completely Americanized by this point. Are they really going to uproot the kids from a land they grew up in to go to a politically unstable and dangerous country right now?

Some might, but there were far too many who looked pretty comfy in America.

Ptichka said:

No, I do not believe it is a step in the right direction. Sure, it's nice to see people voting and all that, but this was a totally foreign engineered action. People did not even know who they were voting for since the candidates were too afraid to have their names listed!

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Amen. I couldn't help but laugh when Bush stood at his little podium on (Iraqi) election day and declaired that "freedom has triumphed." I swear, that man is the king of preemption. Not only does he declair preemptive war, he declairs preemptive victory! ('Mission acomplished,' right? )

I also thought it was kind of weird that Iraqis living here got to vote...but then again, if an American is living out of the country during our elections, we can vote absentee, so I guess its kind of the same thing.

I think its far, far too late to withdraw our troops with any sort of dignity. We're in this shat up to our eyebrows now, and the only way we could concevably withdraw (with any sort of chin up and support from the world) will be when the fighting stops. Which will be approxamatly never, I think . After going in there like that, guns blazing, and overthrowing their government, we can't very well abandon them. Well we could (and I get the sick feeling that might be what Bush is planning to do after acheving the "election" which was 'his objective all along'), but it would be a really rotten thing to do. I think we're pretty effectivly screwed at this point.