The warbloggers realize that their purple-finger romantic haze hasn’t quite obscured the truth of their Iraqi Fantasy Elections, so they roll lame-o joker Arthur “Good News!!” Chrenkoff out to refute the argument of those who refuse to buy the democratic bait and switch they tried to pull with their patronizing Iraqi Heroes Justify Everything We Ever Did election scenario.
The killer point that they’re trying to smother is that Bush and Cronies did everything they could possibly do to stymie elections in Iraq up until the point that elections got shoved down their throat by Ayatolla Ali al-Sistani, while the Shi`a held their noses and made them swallow. If you’re among the confused, swopa laid it all out here.
Chrenkoff tries to sell the line that the Bushies always wanted to install a democracy in Iraq, so how can you pin the Iranian Theocracy/Independent Kurdistan with a side of Sunni Guerilla War on them? Which might work on those who can remember less than two years of history ( a largeish group, to be sure) but for those who remember that this is not a new argument, that it was in fact in use over two years ago when those of us opposed to the invasion tried, after the moral and the legal arguments got trampled in the rush to war, to make the pragmatic point to the Flowers and Candy CakeWalkers of Democracy that they would end up in the loser position of ushering in the first Shi`a Arab government ever while the Kurds demanded autonomy and the Sunni Arabs turned to violent resistance in a desperate war against both factions. Here’s poor Arthur, Warblogger Sacrificial Goat:
…the US originally wanted to ensure that Iraq’s new constitution is drafted in a process that involves all the ethnic and religious groups, particularly the Arab Sunnis who would otherwise feel most left out (thus the Administration was prepared to live with overrepresentation of some groups, such as the Sunnis, and underrepresentation of others, like the Shia). In the end, the Americans have bowed down to Ayatollah Sistani’s demands of “one person one vote” election to choose the National Assembly which would in turn draft the constitution. This arrangement guaranteed that the Shia would win the majority and the Sunnis would largely boycott the poll.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what we said would happen if they occupied Iraq with their moronic “democracy” plan in the first place. Oh, but the answer to that argument was to screech WMD!! repeatedly. Now, we’ll just pretend that the WMD phase never happened and that the antiwar argument never got hooted down by the Mushroom Clouders and you’re just all doing your very, very best to assure those adorable, purple-fingered Iraqis the best possible Western Democratic life ever. Unfortunately, reality is difficult to hide in the long term, no matter how much lipstick you apply to your democracy pig. Even the most credulous Red-Stater will eventually notice that, hundreds of billions of tax dollars and thousands of dead Americans later, they still can’t book a fabulous vacation on the Tigris or tour the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon without being shot as infidels by one faction or another.