Tuesday, October 25, 2005
[1854 - Lord Cardigan leads charge of the Light Brigade {Battle of Balaclava}]
Another Slam Dunk?
It was widely reported in the press, that the President characterized the certified results of the referendum on the Iraqi Constitution as a stunning victory. The US Ambassador to Iraq, who has the unenviable task of dealing with the mess over there on a daily basis, was a good deal more realistic about it. He said that the adoption of the Constitution was an important step on the path to an Iraqi state that could stand on its own without the need for us to prop it up. The good news is that there was a good turnout of the Iraqi voters, and significant participation by the Sunni minority in the electoral process. The bad news is that the Sunnis voted overwhelmingly against the new Constitution coming within a hair's breadth of defeating it. In two provinces they posted the required two-thirds "no" votes, and in a third they attained a 55% "no" vote majority, falling just short of the third province rejection that would have sent the constitutional process back to square one.
In spite of this result, that is surely much closer to a squeaker than an outright victory, the President clings to the fanciful notion that democracy can be exported and sold abroad with Arabic subtitles like a Hollywood movie. If the President or his advisors had paid any attention to history, they might have noticed that although we were successful in installing democracy in Japan and Germany following World War II, it was a feat accomplished at considerable cost. It took several decades of foreign aid, starting with the Marshall Plan in 1948, and more than a decade of US occupation of those countries. We also had the benefit of working with populations that were conquered, subdued, and badly frightened by our military might, which had devastated their cities and put their very survival in question. There was nothing surgical about WW-II. Just ask the senior residents of Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.
Who in their right mind could have believed that we could install a viable democracy in a Muslim fundamentalist society in a couple of years or so? Democracy is not imposed from the top down; it must be carefully implanted from the bottom up, and nurtured for a span of many years before it takes firm root.
William's Whimsical Words:
The tree of liberty may be nourished by the blood of patriots, but no one said that it could be fertilized with the bodies of modern day crusaders.
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