Democracy Born in Iraq Today

Last night we were flipping around, looking for something to watch on television. My husband said, "Look - here's the state of television news today: all the cable news channels are doing stories about the Iraq election...and CBS' '48 Hours' is doing Michael Jackson."

That says a lot.

This morning it was hard for anyone to say the Iraq elections were anything but a success. Too many brave Iraqis, stepping over the bodies of suicide bombers to file into the polling places, and then emerging elated holding their purple-inked fingers aloft.

But, of course, someone had to drag The Loser Lurch out of the mothballs, and so he appeared on a news talk show, Botoxed and pancaked and puffed up like an adder, spewing poison. He really has no sense of embarassment whatsoever, as he droned on about how when he was campaigning he had said there were four things it would take to make Iraq a success (laying the tiresome tirade out to us, finger by finger). Then he said that the next few days would be THE LIFE OR DEATH test of the Bush Administration - how they handled what would come next would show whether they could succeed or not. Yada yada yada.

Earth to Lurch: Success is yet to be determined? That horse is out of the barn already, Blow-Dry Boy. The Bush Administration pulled off a free election in Iraq despite predictions for months and months that it would never come off, that it was too soon, that it would not happen. The Iraqi electorate just showed the apathetic, barely-voting American electorate what "the vote" really means.

But Lurch wasn't the first to try to turn victory into defeat. I think that dishonor probably belongs to this fellow at Newsweek magazine, who wrote that elections are not democracy and that "it was not what many of us had hoped for." And he wrote this before the elections even took place (it is posted today for the 2/7 issue of the magazine). I'm sure what "many of us" hoped for is that the terrorists and criminals who comprise the so-called insurgency would launch a massive massacre and intimidate the Iraqi people into staying home and not voting. Then "many of us" would be able to shriek that America's attempt to bring democracy to Iraq is a failure.

These people - the Bush-hating mainstream media and marginalized Democrats who will not abandon partisanship for a higher ideal - are a dying breed. Die quicker, I say.

Comments

[The Commissar]

Fareed Zakaria is a good guy. He is NOT "one of them."

His concerns are well-founded. Building what he calls a "liberal" democracy, rather than an "illiberal" democracy is HUGE challenge.

It's only realistic to note that we may have to settle for what we can get. If that's Russia rather than Iowa, I'll accept that.

[The Accidental Harpist]

Fair comment, Comissar, and Zakaria may be one of the good guys, but yesterday he was displaying some unattractive hubris. I'm not the only one who felt that way about his piece. Here's what John Podhoretz wrote in the NY Post today:

"...In another jaw-dropping display, Fareed Zakaria soberly informs us in this week's issue that Iraq's democratic evolution is probably doomed because — get this — it isn't proceeding according to a plan he outlined in a book he published two years ago.

No, I'm not kidding.

"No matter how the voting turns out," Zakaria wrote, "the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim . . . In April 2003, around the time Baghdad fell, I published a book that described the path to liberal democracy . . . In Newsweek that month, I outlined the three conditions Iraq had to fulfill to avoid this fate. It is currently doing badly at all three."

Whoa, better stop the vote counting, Omar! You Iraqis aren't following the Zakaria Plan! Tell you what — I'll go to my dentist's office and send you an old copy of Newsweek from his coffee table so that you can get yourself right with Zakaria."