December 15, 2005

"We lost a lot during the last elections, but this time we will take our normal and key role in leading this country."

Heavy voter turnout in Iraq, including in the Sunni areas, where the value of participating seems to have made an impression.

9 comments:

Asher Abrams said...

There's ongoing live coverage of the Iraqi elections here.

Lou Minatti said...

I scrolled down the page real fast, saw this headline, and for a moment I thought this was going to be about a Howard Dean rant.

Paul is a Hermit said...

What courage to go vote! To be seen by all, to be seen standing in those lines by all and face possible death or mangling for it.
Here it requires nothing more than getting up off my dead a__ to do it.
I wonder what the turnout would be here, following the past several years of violence faced by peaceable people there. I wonder would I stop on my way to work, or after work knowing there are those who may harm me, seeing me, knowing me, possibly picking me as the example for tomorrow.
I admire those people.

KCFleming said...

3 comments on an historic vote. A bunch on Kong.

Ho-hum, voting in Iraq. No CNN or CBS coverage of note.

Meanwhile, back at the DNC, Kerry advises Dems to impeach Bush over the Lies that got us into the boring voter-turnout-in-Iraq stuff in the first place.

Goatwhacker said...

3 comments on an historic vote. A bunch on Kong.

You're right, possibly because there's not much controversy that this is a good thing. There is a very long way to go in Iraq, but today was a positive step.

Sloanasaurus said...

Perhaps one of Bush's greatest failures will be the failure to bring a majority of democrats into supporting freedom and democracy in Iraq. This group will go to their graves in opposition. They will hate Iraq for the next 50 years, just as southerners did not feel part of America for generations after the Civil War. Supporters of the Iraq policy need to remember this if the anti-war group ever gets power.

It's hard to blame Bush for failing to convince idiots of a noble effort, however, a master politician would have achieved it. Bush didn't quite reach this level.

Sloanasaurus said...

"...Let's pretend that our reasons for invading Iraq were so the Iraqis could hold elections...."

It seems to me that this actually was Bush's ultimate goal. if it wasn't, then why didn't he just pull out after we caught Saddam or after we found no WMD. Why did it matter that there was looting or that the Iraqi army was disbanded....

The whole plan was to turn Iraq into a state that did not desire to be a terror state or produce WMD with the purpose of using it aggressively.... i.e., a Democracy. Just going in and removing the weapons would have been a stupid plan.

I don't recall a controversy about what we wanted to achieve after the invasion. In fact the critics blasted the "necons" for their pipe dreams of a democracy Iraq. And they still are.

In Iraq setting up a democracy was always the plan.

Unknown said...

Well said, Sloan. The opposition, like the Copperheads of their time, will throw a monkey wrench into history for years to come.

As for you, chriso, I would have supported it and so would many others. Those of us who are old enough to remember do so with shame over the pullout of 1991 and the slaughter that followed. We owed the Iraqis. We were cowardly allies and had to redeem ourselves as democratic people. Of course, we were only emulating the surrender in Korea and in Vietnam.

Jacob said...

I don't know where pogo heard that about Kery's comments on impeachment. It was probably from one of the articles that you can bring up with a simple Google News search for Kerry + Impeachment.