May 20, 2006
Triumph!
Washington Post: Iraqi Parliament Approves New Cabinet: May 20--Iraq's parliament swore in its full-term prime minister and his cabinet Saturday, a political milestone U.S. leaders hope will allow a new government to begin solving the country's problems and lead to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops...
This is a splendid moment folks! As has happened many times in the past few years, the nay-sayers have been proved wrong, and George W Bush and his supporters have been vindicated. And the people of Iraq have once again repudiated the sneering democracy-hating leftists who said, wishfully, that their hopes of freedom were doomed.
<obligatory disclaimer>Of course Iraq will hit many rough patches in the years to come, and might even fail </obligatory disclaimer> But I predict that Iraq will continue to justify our faith,and there will be more moments like this to look forward to.
And it is also easy to predict that our despicable America-hating news media will continue to underplay any American triumph, especially if it might help Republicans. If you think I'm exaggerating, just read the article. One sentence of good news, "balanced" by the entire rest of the article being filled with any bad news that they could scrape up, with almost no positive information about the new Government. They've done their duty for their bosses at the DNC.
Even the one picture that accompanies the article is not of the new Prime Minister, but of a funeral some some guy in the Al-Mahdi Army, killed by police (Good for them).
And even that one sentence is stupidly snarky and negative. "a political milestone U.S. leaders hope will allow a new government to begin solving the country's problems" What crap. the Iraqis have already made enormous strides in solving their problems. Read this, if you doubt me.
Oh well, the annoyance is a small matter compared to knowing that I'm on the winning side, and the terrorist/news-media/Democrat Alliance is losing.
Posted by John Weidner at May 20, 2006 05:48 PMIt would be great if people would realize how quickly this difficult moment has come to fruition. This is not a docudrama where everything happens over night. Decades of differences take time to compromise. (hold me back - or I'll say too much!) ;-) Great post and to the point.
Posted by: chrys at May 20, 2006 08:53 PMHave no fear, when Iraq finally matures and blossoms, it will be completely ignored. Just like when the former Soviet republics finished their climb out from under their Soviet past and into a Western future by joining NATO, it was given a headline in the international section and otherwise ignored as irrelevant. I've always loved this post of yours:
There were many heros in that long stubborn struggle, and few of them were ever greeted with brass bands and cheers. Many were like the rangers in Lord of the Rings, grimly watching and guarding through the decades so Hobbits could be safe and comfortable (and turn into petulant leftists enjoying the fat years and yet fawning over Marxist dictators and freedom-hating professors.)
...and to add to that, those heros are still reviled as either paranoid or naive or military-industrial-complexites, and not as the heros they were. Let's hope today's heros don't share the same fate.
But then, let's hope Iraq does share the same fate as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania...
(Your update post with a picture of the flag-raising here)
Thanks for the reminder!
And Chrys, we should also remember the bloody reprisals in France after WWII. No one called that a reason to say France could not be a democracy.
Saddam's Terror was far worse than Hitler's (unless you were Jewish) This will certainly take a while, and considering Iraq's past it is the lack of a "civil war" that is remarkable.
Posted by: John Weidner at May 21, 2006 08:15 AM
