http://www.mydd.com/comments/2005/1/30/12745/0347/26#26

At the very least everyone should hope that Iraq's elections succeed in ushering a new era of democracy for the country, however painful the growing pain.

Rooting for Bush's failure is the height of cynicism and plain selfish disregard for the plight of the Iraqi people who deserve a brighter future. Hoping for Bush to succeed doesn't in any way run counter to holding him absolutely accountable for any and all failures as a result of his policies.

Slate's Fred Kaplan has a good article on these sentiments here: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112885/

I posted extensively about this at my blog, Scrutiny Hooligans .  Here's an excerpt from the closing of one post:

"It's only insurgents, terrorists, George W. Bush and his administration, a comatose media, religious nationalism, the distrust of the world, apathy, and a dozen other things we've got to overcome. Daunted? Me too. To think that freedom and democracy might take hold in Iraq is terrifically naive, but what else will we support and work towards? While cursing every darkness, the left can also light a candle of solidarity with those who aspire to be free.

When a GOP-paid pundit spouts the party line, do we call him a 'journalist'?  Do we say 'well, at least some news is getting out, better than nothing?'  To me the lack of security (which is the fault of this administration, for not sending adequate numbers of troops) virtually guaranteed an invalid election.  I want free and fair elections in Iraq - that's what our soldiers died for.  Lipstick on a pig.

This election represents, once again, when the distractors to the Iraq war are wrong.   Wrong about intial invasion, wrong about looting, wrong about election posibilities.  I am sick of it.  

To the American people it is simple, people want freedom, freedom is good.  The DFL needs to be on the right side of this issue, before it is too late.  Democracy in Iraq is moving forward.  There is no reward without risk.  I am unsure if the American people will allow a 4th quarter jump on the band wagon to gain political favor, but it is better than after the game.  

Okay, so I know the whole Potemkin village thing is largely mythical, but as a metaphor it fits here. It is wonderful to see so many Iraqis willing to embrace the notion of democracy, but an election does not a democracy make. There has been so much attention given to the election process-- and the constant threat of violence hanging over it in some places-- that not enough attention has been given to what the outcome could mean. Who are the candidates? Have they all been vetted by the Bush administration and their puppets in the Iraqi provisional government? If the newly elected candidates-- ostensibly the representatives of Iraqi people-- voice their desire to have the U.S. pull most or all of it's troops out of Iraq, will their 'sovereignty' be respected? Here in the U.S. we've had two successive presidential elections marred by the scandal of corruption and vote theft. Beneath that ugly face lay the putrifying flesh of the two-party system. Since we have all either tacitly or eagerly accepted the results of those corrupted elections, what does that say about our own commitment to democracy? I submit that we are more enamored of the artifice than we are of the substance. The Iraqi elections are a sham, and the cruelest part of the prank is that many Iraqis are risking their lives to participate in it. Regardless of what anonymous candidates win office, the U.S. will still have over 100,000 troops stationed in permanent bases around Iraq. The U.S. will still have the largest embassy in it's history (currently headed by John "Batallion 3-16" Negroponte) in place. If the massive corruption that has already been evident in the contracting of 'reconstruction' work is any indication, then the outward flow of Iraqi resources (into the coffers of politically connected U.S. multinationals) will continue. Iraq will be a U.S. puppet, and a massive oil kleptocracy to boot. The insurgents are fighting against this enslavement of their country. Unfortunately for most Iraqis, what many (if not most) of the insurgents are fighting for won't be much better. However, this could likely have all been avoided if the Bush administration's true intent had been the welfare of the Iraqi people, and not the enrichment of it's friends and the appeasement of it's own resident neocon imperialists.

ADDENDUM

Of course, what are we to do now?  I've seen a lot of rhetoric, especially in this thread, about how all 'liberals' and progressives should be getting behind our democracy-hungry brethren in Iraq.  I couldn't agree more, but I reiterate my assertion about our own grasp of democracy:  we don't have it right here, so we can't be expected to help others.

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, `Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
(Matthew 7:3-5)

If we're to be taken seriously about promoting democracy anywhere, then we need to make sure that the ones doing the promotion on our behalf aren't anti-democratic neofascists like the Bush administration. The Bushies don't give a rat's whisker about the Iraqis.  Their overtures about democracy are merely a smoke screen to provide justification for their colonial intentions.

Jeez, people, we've been through this before with the Bushies.  Haven't they proven their total lack of credibility already?

And true enough, what Bush father and many others predicted came true and America is left holding the bag.  ($300B and thousands died and maimed).  

http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/013005.htm#013105

We have a really lousy record in this regard.

I felt a surge of emotion when I heard about the vote. I'm happy for the Iraqis who are tasting democracy and personal power for the first time and -ALSO- for our troops who've paid (along with Iraqi civilians) the biggest price for the war. They've died or have been wounded or have lost their comrades, and they've been changed, at the very start of their adult lives, into the people who fire our weapons and kill for us, and they had to have been hoping that it all meant something, not just Saddam's defeat, but to the Iraqi people. Yesterday was a good day for them after hundreds of very bad days.

I know the administration is going to be trumpeting the election as a vindication of the war and I think that stinks. It stinks that good news for the Iraq people and our troops requires a 'Yes, but...' for anyone that disagrees with the Bush policies. It stinks that the Republicans get to be cynical and cold calculators (privately), while we have to be the white hat guys and rise above. They have it a lot easier than we do. They get to talk high ideals while behaving otherwise. We have to do both.

There should be a good word to describe the fix that we're in.

Instead, we should be gracious and thrilled that the election went far better than it might have (which it clearly did).  Save your cautious caveats for later.

Honestly, if we can't learn simple principles like this, it's no wonder we fail to gain the trust of so much of the nation.

I supported removing Saddam by force prior to 9-11, and afterwards I joined the Army to do so. I faced the months of combat, I saw friends die, I killed.

I support the war, as did most Americans. I don't support the occupation. We aren't there to build schools. The Iraqis can do that. We aren't there to pump oil. The Iraqis can do that. We aren't there to make laws, conduct elections, or keep the peace. Iraqis can do that. They really can.

This election, as it represents handing it over to the shiites, is a great thing. It should have happened sooner. We could have avoided the April 4 uprising. Shiites can govern by means other than brute force: they can use religion and culture. We cannot.

At first the pro Israel people didn't want a shiite theocracy (call it what you will, that's what it will be). You know what? Who cares what they want! I want American troops, the same 500,000 or so guys and gals, to be free of the endless deployments and death at the hands of a shadowy enemy.

A pandoras box was opened on September 11th. Americans as a whole, not just Bush, are part of that. We don't know the exact path, but its probable that in a generation the Arabs will ge their act together and relegate religion to the sideline where it belongs.

Bottom Line: we don't have to baby sit them for twenty years.

Lets get some things straight, 1. The people of Iraq did not even know was going to run until about a week before this so called election. 2. The people of Iraq have been bombed into the stone age, many don't have electricity, running water, food, medicine, etc and have to put up with living in a war zone, one of the most sickening things I read over the weekend in the mainstream media was how turnout in Falluja was non-existent, as if anyone was actually in the deserted ruins of that city, these people are in hell so to speak they probably would have turned out in large numbers if Saddam was the only person on the ballot if they thought it would end the hell they live in. 3. The Shias were issued a religious fatwah by Sustani to get out and vote. 4.We don't know is monitoring the election the UN does not have any real staff in the country as far as I know. Who is counting the so called vote, how do we know that the most important part of democracy, actually counting the votes is being done in anything close to resembling democracy?

I could go on and on and I do hope that this turns out well for the Iraqi people, but we as liberals have to stand for democracy itself and not the sham that this election is. In country after country dictators hold sham elections as a show to the world that they are truly elected by the people, and liberals all over the world face them down as the sham that they are and will not allow the world to give them any credibility. For some reason the people of the world seem to be getting used to the idea that democracy is elections and as long as we line people up on the street and let them go through some the actions that we have democracy and that is just plain false and will give way to significant problems to the people of countries where dictator after dictator will be stood up as the victors of these sham elections.

Democracy instilled in such a way is false hope for the people of the countries that participate in the appearance of Democracy and in the end will cause them to turn away from it because it does not deliver them anything but continuing misery even though they appear to be free to the rest of the world.

Let liberals stand for something true and genuine and not a sham, how can we even call this democracy when Iraq's number one asset has already been sold down the river to the IMF and all of their other state assets are on the privatization chopping block in return for the IMF dollars that they need in order for them to rebuild the infrastructure that we have destroyed.

We depose a tyrant, come in and steal their oil, destroy their country, make them live in hell for nearly two years while arresting them and then torturing them, then we hold this false election over them as their way out of all of this only to submit them into eternal slavery by lending them the money to, well, you know "get back on your feet".

Democracy is not the product of democratic elections, democratic elections are the product of democracy and that my friend is what we liberals stand up for not the other way around.

Ultimately, the success of the election will be determined by whether or not the Iraqis accept the outcome as legitimate.  Let's at least wait until the outcome is known before we try to declare a success.

The particapation rates I have seen quoted in the media so far are impressive and would be a reason to be hopeful.  But I don't know how much credibility to give to these figures because I belive the bush administration lies when ever it suits it's purposes.

It is quite possible (I would argue rational) to be in favor of all the good liberal things mentioned in this diary, and yet to have real questions about the nature of these elections, and to believe that standing with Bush at anytime is just nuts.

Learn from the master. On the one hand, yesterday was indeed an historic day for Iraq:

But he is appalled by the mainstream media "boosterism" and "cheerleading." This election wouldn't even meet Florida standards:

Bush wanted nothing to do with even these flawed elections:

And Iraqi voters are unlikely to get what they want out of this "democratic election," which may lead to longer-term problems:

This flawed election is, of course, far from a solution to Iraq's problems:

So yes, let's celebrate the fact that at least some Iraqis had, for once, something to dance about yesterday, even as we refuse to suspend our critical faculties about the nature of the Bush administration, or of what happened yesterday.

And let's not forget that, over time, and as more information comes in, the interpretation of yesterday's election as a "success" may come into question (already we are aware of the propaganda claiming 70% to 80% turnout).

With this crowd in power, unfortunately, yesterday's election is likely to recede into the background just as quickly as the taking of Baghdad or the capture of Sadaam, to be replaced by the ongoing truth of Iraq as a deeply insecure "armed camp."

Bush lied to get his war and screwed it up to all hell.  But I've been incredibly disappointed in the fact that many liberals seem to want Iraq to fail just to make Bush look bad.

Iraq hasn't failed yet.  1300 soliders is a large price to pay, and a for the families of those soldiers, an unquantifiable cost.  However, to be realistic, 1300 soldiers over nearly two years is a tiny casualty count in the context of every war this country has ever fought in.  We lost 1300 soliders in about 10 seconds at Omaha Beach.  We lost 50K dead in Vietnam. It scares me that people are so spooked by relatively small casualties if we ever have to fight a war to truly defend this country (and no, I do not believe that Iraq was a direct threat to the USA)

If we succeed in Iraq, and it's a huge if, then it will have been worth it.  Dems have treated Iraq as nothing more than a political issue, as evidence by Kerry's shameless position honing on the war.  Instead of a "position" on the war, Kerry and most other Dems needed an opinion on it.  By never taking Iraq seriously except as a way of scoring political points on Bush, we essentially gave him a blank check to completely botch the war, alienate allies, torture prisoners, and anger (or kill) countless Iraqis.

Nonetheless, I want this to succeedm even if Bush looks good as a result.  Transforming the Middle East is the great challenge of our age.  

As a liberal, I have always supported an aggressive use of our power to promote democracy and human rights.  When we go isolationist as a party, we join the ranks of the Pat Buchannan's of the world.  That's not where I want to be.  We were right to go to Kosovo.  We should have gone to Rwanada to stop the genocide. We should have gone to Liberia when the people there begged us to provide stability.  We should have done more to stop the current genocide in Sudan.  We should put more pressure on corrupt African regimes, but at the same time we should provide many times more aid to Africa than we currently do now to deal with the staggering AIDS epidemic.  This is consistent with liberalism, and liberals should support this.  

I'm not ashamed of an aggressive foreign policy that promotes democratic values.  I'm ashamed that Democrats are slowly putting themselves in the isolationist camp or the EU appeasement camp. I don't want to see us turn into a peacenik isolationist, UN party.  The UN is a useless institution that has developed a tendency to moral equivalency and appeasement.

Our party's approach to the last four years resulted in nothing but letting Bush get away with in botching the war in Iraq and dishonestly conflating it with the war on terror.

This was the site of a mortar attack on a queueing line for voting that killed a few people:

As dismal as voting turnouts are in America, I have to wonder just how much courage Americans would have in the same situation. I bet all the chickenshit republicans would stay home.

If my links don't work, go here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/31/iraq/main670356.shtml

It's reality - and if we refuse to discuss reality - kinda makes rationale thought a waste of time.

2. Was it worth it?  If this works - it's a great success!  Really, how many people would have voted for this two years ago if they knew that the cost would be $300 Billion, 10,000 wounded, and the loss of the ability of the US to intervene anywhere else?  I think we could all draw up lists of better uses for those resources.

3. Look at the track record.  The elections looked great - it was a good sign.  But so was the initial invasion, the capture of Saddam, the turnover in sovereinty, etc.  And now comes the hard part - the negotiations for power.  If you are a betting man, and you saw the track record, really where would you put your $s?

4. Read the press from Vietnams 1967 election of Kos - it's scary.