Saturday, November 04, 2006

Chinia: To The Last Islamist Proxy

Of course, our democracy needs a bit of work also:
"In my view, Iraqi participation in elections, sometimes at great personal risk, goes a long way towards answering those who say there's something in the Iraqi (or Arab) DNA that is incompatible with the administration's democracy project. Unfortunately, though, more was required of the Iraqi peoople than just voting. The situation called on them to elect leaders who would work in good faith for national reconciliation, rather than tilting substantially in the direction of one sectarian faction. The Iraqis failed to do this when they voted in the Shia-militia-friendly Malacki government, thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for the U.S. to work with the current government to curb sectarian violence.

The Iraqis, of course, are not the first people to make a very bad decision at the polls.
The fact that they did so is not necessarily evidence of some national "genetic" flaw, much less a demonstration that democracy can't work in the Middle East. It just means that the Iraqi people did less than what a difficult situation required, and that we must face up to and deal with the consequences. [ And of course, any discussion of Iraq that ignores the pandemic role of Isamlism and its remaining state sponsors including Iran, Syria (Irania together to my view), Pakistan (having malignant A.D.D., the press seems to hardly notice that Afghanistan is not going well either because of you-know-who in spite of supposedly being the "good war" to Iraq's "bad war") and many other Arab states like the Saudis (15 of the 19 hijackers, how soon we forget) and Egyptians in at least some role. Along that line, Vanity Fair's interviews with the most vilified neocons is interesting. While there's a lot of good insight from them, I notice that the word "Iran" has been carefully edited out of this preview. Most conspicuously from Michael Ledeen who rarely speaks or writes a paragraph without the name "Iran" in it; and I notice that this quote -- while a good insight nonetheless -- probably consists of the only two sentences he uttered without Iran as the subject: -ed. ]

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."
"
Just as in Korea and Vietnam, if we got serious and really wanted to win we would end up fighting the Chinese and Russians more and more directly, so today the situation is the same but the proxies have changed. Now Chinia (China+Russia) has decided to fight us to the last Islamist -- and the Islamists are mostly happy to do so given our alignment with Israel. If you can't understand this from China's ridiculous stringing us along on the NorKorComs (the WMD and delivery system supply proxy to speed the Islamists along) and Russia's ludicrous statements that they believe that Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, I have many bridges to sell you...