#14862: DarkSyde — 01/31  at  06:58 PM
BTW out of that 10,000 WIA ... We've seen the traumatic amputations and horrible burns. What we haven't seen are the rumored ward after ward of the victims of serious head injury. Word is there are tons, from total vegetables who will die sooner or later, to guys who can't feed themselves, can't talk, don't know who they are, can't function above the scattered-shallow stage. Basically like serious stroke victims, but in their teens and twenties mostly. I hear it's a real horror show.

#14864: PZ Myers — 01/31  at  07:05 PM
But Iraq had an election!

#14867: Reed A. Cartwright — 01/31  at  07:13 PM
Do we even know who won yet?

I wouldn't be calling this a victory for our cause if an anti-American government was elected.

#14868: DarkSyde — 01/31  at  07:15 PM
LOL ... Yes it is a slap-happy warm fuzzy victory for all that neoconia stands for eh?
I'll tell you, this is it. This is our last, hail Mary, long bomb toss with 12 seconds left on the clock chance, to get things right enough to skedaddle the hell out of there before it crashes and burns with our men and women stuck in the shit.
Except that according to Neocon ideology/dream world 101, we weren't going to ever leave at all. In fact, they've already started building something like a dozen large fire bases out in the middle of nowhereville desert ... many of these opcenters are nicely placed in the center of a triangle with Ghawar, Al-Aberdeen, and Rumalia, forming the points. The three largest producing reserves of oil on earth. What a coinky-dink huh?

#14869: — 01/31  at  07:19 PM
And elections worked out great nearly 4 decades ago in Viet Nam!

(from http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/31/2335/87390)


U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- 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.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
...
Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.

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 election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.

Few members of that junta are still around, most having been ousted or exiled in subsequent shifts of power.

Significance Not Diminished

The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken.

The hope here is that the new government will be able to maneuver with a confidence and legitimacy long lacking in South Vietnamese politics. That hope could have been dashed either by a small turnout, indicating widespread scorn or a lack of interest in constitutional development, or by the Vietcong's disruption of the balloting.

American officials had hoped for an 80 per cent turnout. That was the figure in the election in September for the Constituent Assembly. Seventy-eight per cent of the registered voters went to the polls in elections for local officials last spring.

Before the results of the presidential election started to come in, the American officials warned that the turnout might be less than 80 per cent because the polling place would be open for two or three hours less than in the election a year ago. The turnout of 83 per cent was a welcome surprise. The turnout in the 1964 United States Presidential election was 62 per cent.

Captured documents and interrogations indicated in the last week a serious concern among Vietcong leaders that a major effort would be required to render the election meaningless. This effort has not succeeded, judging from the reports from Saigon.

#14871: — 01/31  at  07:21 PM
Let me ask you 3 geniuses a question:

1. Do you think the majority of Iraquis, who braved terrorist threats to their lives yesterday to vote, agree more with (a) your view of Iraq or (b)President Bush's view?

Pick one (a) or (b) without all this editorializing nonsense.

#14872: — 01/31  at  07:22 PM
I can't wait until they tear the head off of the George W. Bush statue that they're going to build.

And they thought the removal of the Hussein regime was liberating...

#14873: Stephen Stralka — 01/31  at  07:23 PM
I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments. I guess our friends on the right have so thoroughly bought into all their cretinous rhetoric about liberals and leftists being a bunch of anti-American freedom-hating terrorist lovers that the actually believe we don't want to see democracy succeed in Iraq.

Another point worth making is that, well, OK, so far they've voted. We don't know what the results are, or if the election was fair, or if a legitimately democratic government will ever be allowed to take power in Iraq. Given the track record of the Bush administration in Iraq so far, I think we're justified in putting our jubilation on hold until we see what the actual outcome of this election is going to be.

#14874: — 01/31  at  07:23 PM
No candidates were even named on the ballots. What kind of election doesn't even feature specific candidates? This is clearly not a Glorious Day for Democracy. It is at best a step - possibly in the right general direction but even that's not certain. The triumphalism coming from politicians and the media reminds me of a now-iconic picture of Dubya in a flight suit below a sign reading "Mission Accomplished". Yeah. Right.

Historion Juan Cole sums it up nicely here:
http://www.juancole.com/2005/01/mixed-story-im-just-appalled-by.html

#14877: DarkSyde — 01/31  at  07:26 PM
Well ti's different from Vietnam, although I understand the lesson and your point. The Shi'a defintely do want more self determintion. Hell, given the shit they've been through I can't blame them. But while they all seem like equally fanatical religious lunatics to us, among the Sunni Muslims, the Shi'a are considered bat-shit crazy heretics. A lower form of life, an embaressment to the 'true Islam'. OBL would love for us to go an hit Iran next. They're his biggest concern now that we've taken out Saddam for him. So far things have been going OBL's way. We've left him more or less alone for almost two years now, and gotten bogged down opening up recruiting stations for Al Qeada in Iraq. But if he sees us coming to our sense, even a little bit, and foresees that when everything is said and done the Shi'as will be better off than before. He may read that correctly, and attack us again, bending heaven and hell to frame Iran as complicit, in the hope we'll go off half cocked again. That's what I'd do.

#14878: DarkSyde — 01/31  at  07:28 PM
Dennis I think it depends on which Iraqi you ask. But most of them are so freaked out of their minds and terrified of being killed in their sleep, they'd probably blab whatever they thought the people holding the camera wanted to hear.

#14879: Stephen Stralka — 01/31  at  07:37 PM
Dennis Stark: Huh? You're asking people to express their opinions, but without any editorializing?

Well, even though I'm not one of the three geniuses you initially addressed, my opinion is this: I can't pretend to know how the majority of Iraqis see their country. However, to the extent that I myself see it as a place that has been a complete basket case for the almost two years that we've been there, and President Bush sees it as a rosy wonderland, I strongly suspect that the majority of Iraqis would incline more to my view than to his.

This is partly because I've tried to gather as much information as I can about what's actually going on there, including trying to find out what actual Iraqis are saying, whereas Bush's view of Iraq has been formed by sticking his fingers in his ears and going "Yah! Yah! Yah! I can't hear you!" whenever someone tries to tell him something he doesn't like.

That is, I don't think the majority of Iraqis are quite as willfully ignorant as the majority of Americans.

#14880: — 01/31  at  07:39 PM
Except for Darksyde (who at least answered the question), I have never seen a bigger bunch of Pussies in my life!

Truthfully, I am gone now.

#14881: Chris Clarke — 01/31  at  07:51 PM
Too bad Stark's gone (not really.)

Because this was written for people like him.

You do not own their courage.

The people who stood in line Sunday did not stand in line to make Americans feel good about themselves.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to justify lies about Saddam and al-Qaeda, so you don't own their courage, Stephen Hayes. They did not stand in line to justify lies about weapons of mass destruction, or to justify the artful dodginess of Ahmad Chalabi, so you don't own their courage, Judith Miller. They did not stand in line to provide pretty pictures for vapid suits to fawn over, so you don't own their courage, Howard Fineman, and neither do you, Chris Matthews.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line in order to justify the dereliction of a kept press. They did not stand in line to make right the wrongs born out of laziness, cowardice, and the easy acceptance of casual lying.  They did not stand in line for anyone's grand designs. They did not stand in line to play pawns in anyone's great game, so you don't own their courage, you guys in the PNAC gallery.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to provide American dilettantes with easy rhetorical weapons, so you don't own their courage, Glenn Reynolds, with your cornpone McCarran act out of the bowels of a great university that deserves a helluva lot better than your sorry hide.  They did not stand in line to be the instruments of tawdry vilification and triumphal hooting from bloghound commandos.  They did not stand in line to become useful cudgels for cheap American political thuggery, so you don't own their courage, Freeper Nation.

You do not own their courage.

They did not stand in line to justify a thousand mistakes that have led to more than a thousand American bodies.  They did not stand in line for the purpose of being a national hypnotic for a nation not even their own.  They did not stand in line for being the last casus belli standing. They did not stand in line on behalf of people's book deals, TV spots, honorarium checks, or tinpot celebrity. They did not stand in line to be anyone's talking points.

You do not own their courage.

We all should remember that.

- Charles Pierce

#14882: PZ Myers — 01/31  at  07:56 PM
Hmm. Mr Stark asks his question at 8:21, checks back 18 minutes later, decides that not enough people have answered him, and stomps off in a snit. I mean, really...it's not as if a zillion people have had a chance to respond. Traffic isn't that high here. I don't even check the site that frequently, and I get an email notice every time there is a new comment, and I didn't even see the thread between his demand and his tantrum.

As for the answer: I guarantee you that the majority of Iraqis do not see this situation eye-to-eye with GW Bush. Imagine that we were invaded and occupied and bombed by, say, France; would we then agree with Chirac's view of our country if he then graciously allowed us to elect a parliament?

#14884: DarkSyde — 01/31  at  08:06 PM
LOL... it doesn't mean we're engaged Dennis. I just happened to have this thread up because I've been dealing with the science challenged all day, elsewhere, and PZ's place is like a welcome oasis of rationality for the nonsense weary.
I could just about believe Bush was flipped out of his gourd after 9-11 and got taken like most of the rest of us if someone wanted to make that case. Plus he lacked the requisite experience to seek dissenting opinion on Iraq, mixed in with a Freudian issue I won't bother to speculate on. Or he could have been the ringleader for all I know. We'll have to wait for the inevitable books to come out, years from now, as each of the Junta gets paid a million bucks to point the finger at someone else and blame the whole shitty mess on the other guy.

But when they dug up a GDCE rotor bearing sleeve from some guys fucking garden and presented that as a nuke threat, I damn near busted out laughing in tears ... that we'd been suckered into feeding tens of thousands of men, women, and children into a meat grinder for that shit.
I'm a hard-nosed, pragmatic, conservative dick. I really don't care about the Iraqis, especially when we have an enemy at large who has received the OK from his nutball theocratic shit-head religious leadership to nuke us, and is making videos promising to attack us until we collapse economically. If the Iraqis want democracy they could have fought for it themselves, like everyone else had to.

This 'let's save the Iraqis from saddam and pay for the whole shebang by going in hock to the Communist Chinese to the tune of half a trillion dollars ... cuz we're such nice folks' is utter bullshit. It's an ad hoc nervous justification made up after no WMD's were found. It's something I'd expect to hear from a goatee sporting adolescent handing out tickets to a green peace rally in the parking lot of whole foods. Not something I'd expect to hear flow from the mind of anyone remotely conservarive. Thats what Bush is reduced to; a caricature of a liberal, idealistic, hippified 60's dufus, saving the world.

#14885: paperwight — 01/31  at  08:11 PM
Thats what Bush is reduced to; a caricature of a liberal, idealistic, hippified 60’s dufus, saving the world.

I wouldn't even say that. The doofus wouldn't have been nearly has sanguine about feeding soldiers and Iraqis into a meatgrinder of a colonial guerrilla war.

#14889: — 01/31  at  08:45 PM
If anti-American groups win in Iraq and the cultists who hijacked our government cry fraud based on exit polling, I'm going to laugh hysterically.

Because I hate crying, man, it stuffs up my sinuses and swells up the inside of my nose and I can't breathe.

#14890: — 01/31  at  08:45 PM
Two words: cautious optimism.

As for the question of "was the war worth it?" I think it's worth reminding everyone that some things are too big to judge. Maybe this war isn't one of them, but some things are.

#14891: — 01/31  at  08:58 PM
Also, this business of "you didn't blog my pet lizard, so U R BAD OMG LOL" is ridiculous. Bloggers aren't obligated to blog; this is what makes blogging so liberating.

#14893: — 01/31  at  09:25 PM
Blog my guinea pig! Here's a picture to get your blogging gears rolling!

#14894: Chris Clarke — 01/31  at  09:52 PM
No, do mine!

#14899: — 02/01  at  12:06 AM
No candidates were even named on the ballots. What kind of election doesn’t even feature specific candidates? This is clearly not a Glorious Day for Democracy. It is at best a step - possibly in the right general direction but even that’s not certain. The triumphalism coming from politicians and the media reminds me of a now-iconic picture of Dubya in a flight suit below a sign reading “Mission Accomplished”. Yeah. Right.

Well, in many democracies elections are party-based. That's how orthodox proportional representation works - you vote for parties, not individuals. The difference between that and Iraq is that in, say, Israel, everybody knows which candidates are in which parties and what their position is, whereas in Iraq people only know who leads each list.

And by the way, in case you wonder how come 70% voted, the answer is that the USA threatened to cut off food rationing for non-voters. I'm beginning to understand Reagan's anti-welfare tirades...

Dennis, how about you ask the 100,000 Iraqis your government murdered to achieve that? They don't care about freedom. They would just care about living.

#14900: — 02/01  at  12:16 AM
Chris Clarke said,

No, do mine!

I agree, Chris. That is a nice liver you've got there!

We do need more posts that focus on livers.

#14907: isabel — 02/01  at  05:45 AM
I'm staring at the picture of A's guinea pig. I thought they were small critters, that you could pretty much be held in one hand. Maybe I'm looking at the picture wrong, but that looks like one big honkin' guinea pig.

Chris, your pig/liver looks like a baby; is it? I've been considering adopting one or two guinea pigs.