Analyst Gets Pat on the Back for Stating the Obvious
Quick question for my readers. Did anyone think that the Sunni would not stage a pretty fierce resistance against democracy in Iraq??
Fact is, predicting that the minority and highly-privileged Sunni in Iraq would not “strongly resist” the effort to reduce them to a position in a democratic government commensurate to their population isn’t a particularly stupendous feat. Any four-year old with a Magic 8-Ball could have done the same.
Yet there’s a former State Department official out there who’s getting a cookie from the Washington Post for saying exactly that, as if his prediction (which, by the way didn’t happen when he said it would) was a huge revelation.
The story works off of the premise that the Bush Administration promised us all cake, pie, and ice cream. It seems to be the belief of quite a few folks on the left, MSM reporters included, that the President was under the impression that once the Saddam war machine was squashed (which happened in record time), the Iraqis would simply leap into democracy as if they hadn’t been serially abused by a dictator for a couple generations and that the minority which heretofore had been able to benefit from that abuse would placidly roll over and accept their new position.
But that isn’t what the administration ever said about bringing democracy to Iraq and there’s not a soul alive who can prove otherwise.
You know, it’s funny, One of the witnesses who testified before the anti-war party’s hearing in Congress said once that Iraq “would not provide fertile ground for democracy” and the article accepts that as fact. Yet Iraq has held three free and open elections in the space of three years with a voter turnout that should make any democratic nation blush. It now has the first ever popularly-ratified constitution that has ever existed in an Arab nation. It has a unity government that is slowly but surely bringing together all the disparate elements of Iraqi society into a working whole. And all in about a third of the time it took us.
If that’s not “fertile ground for democracy” then there is no such thing.
I wonder how the Iraqis are going to view the media coverage of these momentous years in a couple of decades. I can’t imagine they’ll appreciate that so many media outlets seem to be rooting against their success today.
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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.
