Oct 15 2005
Glorious Day In Iraq!
A huge day in Iraq as the people of that country come together and vote in their new, democratic government. All the whining and naysaying by the liberals for the last 3 years will be seen for what is: defeatism.
This morning, the numbers voting seem quite large outside the Sunni areas, and the process fairly peaceful.
American troops in Humvees rattled down Baghdad streets, U.S. helicopters hovered in the skies, and Iraqi soldiers and police ringed polling stations at schools and other public buildings. Driving was banned to stop suicide car bombings by Sunni-led insurgents determined to wreck the vote.
Militants attacked three of the capital’s 1,200 polling stations, wounding two policemen and a civilian, but Iraq was mostly peaceful. Nearly 450 people had been killed by Sunni-led insurgents in the 19 days before Saturday’s vote, often by suicide car bombs, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings.
In the south, the heartland of Iraq’s Shiite majority, lines formed at polling stations in Basra, Hillah and other major cities as people poured in to vote on a constitution Shiite leaders have strongly supported. The community’s top cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has told followers they must vote “yes.”
“Today, I came to vote because I am tired of terrorists, and I want the country to be safe again,” said Zeinab Sahib, a 30-year-old mother of three, one of the first voters in the mainly Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada. “This constitution means unity and hope.”
But turnout appeared low in the early hours in Sunni Arab towns in the center and west.
Ramadi, the capital of overwhelmingly Sunni Arab Anbar province, looked like a ghost town. At the hour polls opened, insurgents clashed with U.S. troops in the downtown streets.
Only about 20 people had voted in the Sunni town of Haditha, northwest of Baghdad, after three hours. Said Ahmad Fliha walked up the hill to the fortified polling station with the help of a relative.
“I’m 75 years old. Everything is finished for me. But I’m going to vote because I want a good future for my children,” Fliha said.
History is in the making, and it is a good history.
Amen to that!
I am glad that America finally elected a President who was a friend to the Iraqi people and didn’t keep letting our oil dollars fund their repression and enslavement.
Bush should be recognized for what he is, a real Abraham Lincoln.
He has let our people be a true friend to the enslaved Iraqi people.
Now our oil dollars will go to the enrichment of the Iraqi nation instead of just to the killer.
The Iraqi people are determined to have government by the ballot, not the bullet.
They are finally awakening from their long totalitarian nightmare, are stepping forward to serve their country, and are taking responsibility for their own country. It takes time to mentally overcome the dictatorship, even when it is gone.
God bless and save George Bush!
God bless and save the new Iraqi government!
Americans can be proud to have helped liberate Iraq, the cradle of an ancient civilization!
Here is an article that gives details about the voting process.
The Iraqi voters were very brave and so were their soldiers and ours!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/15/AR2005101500469.html
Here are some highlights:
“Large numbers of Iraqi voters ignored sporadic outbreaks of violence and voted Saturday in a constitutional referendum that would increase the role of Islam in the government and formalize Iraq’s democracy. But insurgent firefights with U.S. Marines and militant attacks on polling places were lowering voter turnout in some areas of the Sunni west.”
“I’ll say yes, yes to the constitution with all 10 of my fingers,” said Nada Abdul Hassan Akashi, a 26-year-old mother clad in a black abaya, or traditional robe, who came to vote with her husband and three young daughters. “My daughters were so excited, and I wanted the new generation to see democracy.”
“Families were reportedly turning out to vote en masse in Tall Afar, where more than 50 people were killed in two attacks earlier this week when suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowded market and outside an army recruiting center.”
“Insurgent groups [launched] a concerted voter intimidation campaign in many areas of the country, particularly in the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad, where leaflets were passed out in the days before the election threatening death to anyone who voted. Underscoring the message, in the run-up to the referendum, militants staged at least five attacks on the offices of the Iraqi Islamic Party, an influential Sunni group that publicly backed passage of the constitution, and the homes of some of its leaders.”
“In Falluja, site of some of the worst fighting of the war, the centers were largely unfortified and were being guarded by local citizens and tribal sheikhs.”
Falluja rocks!!!!
Here is an article in the Washington Post that the President’s national Security Adviser Stephen Hadley wrote about the constitutional referendum.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/14/AR2005101401677.html
Here are some highlights:
“the draft constitution is a document written by Iraqis for Iraqis. It has every prospect of becoming the national compact needed for a free, peaceful and democratic country.
The draft constitution provides for a federal, not a partitioned, Iraq. It establishes a sensible separation of powers between branches and levels of government. The central government enjoys powers similar to those granted our own federal government. It has exclusive authority over national defense, fiscal policy, foreign affairs, customs, citizenship and commerce across internal boundaries. Iraq’s oil and gas resources are owned by all Iraqis.”
The provisions of the draft constitution “not only reflect the interests of Shiites and Kurds but are also designed to appeal to Arab Sunnis. The constitution is the “guarantor of Iraq’s unity,” and the central government must “preserve the unity, integrity, independence and sovereignty of Iraq.” ”
“The Sunni Arabs understand the efforts that have been made to meet their concerns — and they are entering the political process.”
“Iraq’s largest Sunni political party (the Iraqi Islamic Party) and the powerful Sunni Religious Foundation endorsed the draft and have urged their followers to vote yes. They reversed their opposition to the constitution after Kurdish and Shiite leaders agreed to a final package of amendments. We must pay tribute to the foresight of many Shiite and Kurdish leaders. They made difficult compromises to accommodate Sunni Arab interests…”
“It’s useful to recall our own constitutional experience when assessing what is taking place in Iraq today. The early draft approved by our Founders in Philadelphia required significant amendment — our Bill of Rights — to ensure ratification. The Constitution has since been amended 17 times. And the Constitution itself was a replacement for our initial attempt at a national compact — the Articles of Confederation. By contrast, in less than three years, Iraq has emerged from a generation of tyranny to vote in a national referendum on a draft constitution written by an elected assembly. Whatever Iraqis decide, this is progress.”
This may seem a bit off-topic, but it is my rejoinder to people of the extreme left, and especially to Professor Ward Churchill, the accused plagiarist who has celebrated the 9-11 attacks, who thinks we need more 9-11 type attacks, and who has given aid and comfort to the butcher of the Iraqi people, Saddam.
Ward Churchill even read the NYT obituary of each WTC victim to confirm their ethnicity and career to prove to himself that THEY were Little Eichmanns: “I read every one of them [NYT obituaries], and the demography was about what I’d expected. ”
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct05/Frank1010.htm
Ward Churchill claimed to be able to speak for those supposedly oppressed by “American Imperialism” because he was supposedly an Indian.
That being the case, there is a very interesting article about Indians called “1491†in the March 2002 issue of “The Atlantic.†The author is Charles C. Mann.
Here is the link.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200203/mann
The author writes that in 1539 De Soto landed in Florida with 300 pigs.
â€[H]alf warrior, half venture capitalist. [De Soto] had grown very rich very young by becoming a market leader in the nascent trade for Indian slaves. The profits had helped to fund Pizarro’s seizure of the Incan empire, which had made Soto wealthier still.†http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
Many cultures at that time engaged in agressive war and slavery. And it was wrong.
Lincoln fought a civil war to end slavery. We are now fighting in Iraq to end the enslavement of the Iraqi people. Finally an American President, George W. Bush, saw that we could no longer pay the enslaver of the Iraqi people, Saddam and his thugs, for our oil.
In the new draft constitution, the oil belongs to all the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people are voting on the draft constitution their elected leaders wrote because America, lead by President Bush, toppled the criminal and murderer who had enslaved them, Saddam.
How does Ward Churchill feel about Saddam? I think he supported Saddam. Churchill writes that the Americans have been killing innocent children in Iraq with bombs and sanctions.
Churchill doesn’t mention all the people Saddam has killed and all the people the terrorists, financed by Saddam’s money, are still killing with their bombs. I think Ward Churchill was really an apologist for Saddam who also masqueraded as an advocate for the Iraqi people just as he masqueraded as an advocate for Indians.
But returning to De Soto. Like Saddam, De Soto enriched himself by enslaving nations, but what De Soto deliberately inflicted on the Indians in 1539, according to the author, was nothing compared to the germs he may have inadvertently released into the forest. Some of these 300 pigs escaped into the forest and may have infected the wildlife.
Mann writes that the germs raced across the continent and killed huge numbers of Indians in a pandemic.
The earliest explorers documented the existence of large Indian cities, but when explorers went back to these cities, there were nothing but skeletons in these cities. The author believes that all these Indian people died of disease.
Historically, pandemic diseases have been one of the tragic resuts of people coming in contact with each other.
The plague came to Europe probably from Central Asia. Does this mean the Central Asians were trying to exterminate Europe?
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 reportedly killed between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
The final issue of the 1918 Journal of the American Medical Association wrote:
“The 1918 has gone: a year momentous as the termination of the most cruel war in the annals of the human race; a year which marked, the end at least for a time, of man’s destruction of man; unfortunately a year in which developed a most fatal infectious disease causing the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Medical science for four and one-half years devoted itself to putting men on the firing line and keeping them there. Now it must turn with its whole might to combating the greatest enemy of all—infectious disease.†(12/28/1918).
Cited in http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
I think that we should be studying pandemics so we can protect people from future pandemics, not using information to make distorted arguments against the existence of the United States.
Churchill talks about an American Holocaust in an ignorant way. He masquerades as an educator, but he is really a polemicist for the enemies of democracy. Churchill is trying to manipulate perceptions about what happened in the past not to educate us about how to improve our lives in the future, but in order to bring down the American government that has helped so many people all over the world have freedom and progress.
Churchill claims that our government is engaged in genocide against Indians and people from the 3rd world. If that is so, why are so many S. Americans coming here? Do they want to be exterminated?
Churchill’s admitted cheerleader the Maoist MIM
[See http://www.mimnotes.info/section.php?file=wardchurchill ]
even claims that the National Public Radio NPR is taking money from pharmaeceutical companies that are hurting people in other countries. http://www.mimnotes.info/news/20050925constantgardener/
MIM writes: “A few hours reading the morning newspapers or browsing the Internet will turn up dozens of stories on how First World pharmaceutical companies exacerbate health problems in Africa.â€
Not everything that pops up on the Internet or in the papers is true, but even if some of these stories have merit, are they the big picture? Haven’t Western-financed vaccination programs and health care saved millions of lives in poor countries?
The Maoist MIM cherry picks his evidence from Hollywood movies and the Internet to make his case that the United States is engaged in biowarfare. Churchill also contends that the United States commits genocide.
In my opinion, MIM and “Professor Moriarty†are the mouthpieces of dictators who currently enslave whole nations. And not in 1500, either.
I am sick of this dictator’s mouthpieces.
The Iraqi people can vote now; they are writing a constitution.
Iraqis are now free to speak with their own mouths because President bush dug up the WMD–Saddam.
Hopefully, Ward Churchill’s forked tongue will soon be history.
His words in support of tyranny are a shameful stain on all our people.
I was watching CNN when the polls closed and they were immediately showing “Breaking News†at the bottom of the screen showing†“Gun fire being heard in Baghdad!â€
Then they instruction the local CNN reporter to immediately find out how bad the situation was in Baghdad. They kept this Breaking News for about 15 minutes before somebody realized this was only shooting in the air for celebrations.
Too funny!