A round-up of analysis from the past few days on the Iraq election.
Antonia Zerbisias got one ball partly rolling in Thursday's Toronto Star when she wrote this:
This week, an old New York Times story was making the left-lib Internet rounds. Dated Sept. 4, 1967, it's headed, "U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote: Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror."
It reads, "United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam ... The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government ..."
Snopes.com rates this potential urban legend a true!
Here's a summary of sourpuss lefty Rick Salutin writing in Friday's Globe and Mail (it was reproduced on rabble.ca):
If turnout wasn't the issue, what was? The meaning of the election, which can be just one thing under an occupation: the end of the occupation. More broadly: true sovereignty, an end to foreign domination. Unless elections address that, they are a diversionary sideshow.
It is astounding how many election partiers ignored this matter. The Globe and Mail's editorial barely mentioned it. Richard Gwyn's claim, in the Toronto Star, that “Bush was right” — not at all. Marcus Gee in The Globe, nothing. It's not as if Canadians lack experience with this dilemma. We have elections — and we have ongoing problems with foreign domination. Back in 1841, Toronto's first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, said: “Responsible government — a fine thing to talk about. But it means independence of foreign control, so far as it has meaning.” His words still echo.
Now does anyone think the U.S. invaded Iraq just to impose elections? It wasn't even No. 1 on their own list of fake reasons. There will be two tests regarding sovereignty: oil and bases. Would the U.S. abide a government that deprived it of control of the region's oil?
Methinks Salutin was a little careless in quoting Gwyn. Here's part of what he said on the Iraq election:
Here it is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right.
President George W. Bush wasn't right to invade Iraq. His justifications for doing so were (almost all of them) either frivolous, in comparison to the scale of the venture, or were outright fraudulent.
Having conquered Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, Bush and his officials and generals then made every blunder that could be imagined by an occupying power, adding several original ones of their own.
But on the defining, fundamental question, Bush was right.
He understood that to defeat an idea, no matter how perverse and brutal it might be, it was necessary to have an opposite and superior idea.
He understood, in other words — instinctively rather than intellectually — that the only way to win a war against terrorism was to turn it into a war for democracy.
But what Gwyn's column also assumed a benignness on the U.S.'s part that I don't think history justifies.
Here's two related NYT stories:
Democracy has to start somewhere