Wednesday, October 25, 2006
[1800 - Thomas Babington Macaulay, poet, historian, born in Leicestershire, England]
[1812 - Frigate USS United States captures HMS Macedonian]
[1838 - Georges Bizet, composer, born in Paris]
[1854 - Lord Cardigan leads charge of the Light Brigade {Battle of Balaclava}]
[1881 - Pablo Picasso, artist, born in Málaga, Spain]
[1888 - Admiral Richard E Byrd, polar explorer, born in Winchester, Virginia]
[1962 - John Steinbeck wins Nobel Prize in literature]
Another Slam Dunk Debunked
President Bush characterized the results of the 2005 referendum on the Iraqi Constitution as a stunning victory. The US Ambassador to Iraq said the adoption of the Constitution was an important step on the path to an Iraqi state that could stand on its own without the need for us to prop it up. Now, a year later, it seems that we should have paid more attention to the fact that the Sunnis voted overwhelmingly against the new Constitution coming within a hair's breadth of defeating it. In two provinces they posted the required two-thirds "no" votes, and in a third they attained a 55% "no" vote majority, falling just short of the third province rejection that would have sent the constitutional process back to square one.
The President's fanciful notion that democracy could be exported and sold abroad in the Mideast with Arabic subtitles like a Hollywood movie has been discredited. If the President or his advisors had paid any attention to history, they might have noticed that although we were successful in installing democracy in Japan and Germany following World War II, it was a feat accomplished at considerable cost. It took several decades of foreign aid, starting with the Marshall Plan in 1948, and more than a decade of US occupation of those countries to build the required institutions. We also had the benefit of working with populations that were conquered, subdued, and badly frightened by our military might, which had devastated their cities and put their very survival in question. There was nothing surgical about WW-II. Just ask the senior residents of Dresden, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Berlin, or Nagasaki.
Who in their right mind could have believed that we could install a viable democracy in a Muslim fundamentalist society in a couple of years or so? Democracy is not imposed from the top down; it must be carefully implanted from the bottom up, and nurtured for a span of many years before it takes firm root.
William's Whimsical Words:
The tree of liberty may be nourished by the blood of patriots, but no one said that it could be fertilized with the bodies of modern day crusaders.
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