The blogosphere is filled with posts decrying the negative reaction of many on the left to the successful elections in Iraq. Great coverage of this latest disgrace have been posted by Captain Ed, Wretchard (who dismembers the absurd Juan Cole, who called the elections "a joke"), and Hugh Hewitt (who also thrashes Cole). Hindrocket has been reading Democratic Underground (PL has many pertinent posts up); Michelle Malkin notes that most leftist bloggers are in hibernation in the wake of the election.
Florida Cracker has a great collection of photos, including one of an Iraqi soldier approaching a polling station on his hands and knees as a sign of respect. (I can't help but note that today's Gospel reading was from the Sermon on the Mount.)
The leader in Monday's Daily Telegraph gets straight to the point by comparing the left's reaction to Iraq with their reaction to South Africa's first democratic election:
That elections are a better thing than tyranny seems a truth so obvious as not to be worth stating. Yet such were the passions aroused by the Iraq war that many Western observers now find themselves hoping, disgracefully, that that country's first free poll will fail.
Left-wing commentators, in Britain as in much of Europe, have focused disproportionately on the difficulties that any state must undergo during a transition process. To many of them, every terrorist bomb, every murdered election official, every sign of heightened military alertness - even the loss of a British aircraft - makes a nonsense of Iraq's democratic aspirations.
Yesterday's high turnout, in defiance of the gunmen, should be celebrated. Of course the Iraqi insurgency is an important story. But this does not explain the loving attention devoted to each setback faced by the forces of order. Compare yesterday's reports with those by the same commentators during South Africa's first democratic election. Then, too, there were many technical problems: electors who were not properly registered, voter intimidation, long queues. But these things were set in their proper context, as the backdrop against which the moving drama of people casting their first ballots was being played out. No one suggested that the clashes between IFP and ANC supporters in Zululand undermined the whole process. No one argued that the backlash by a handful of black homeland chieftains and Boer irreconcilables made South Africa unfit for democracy.
Its conclusion speaks for me and, I'm sure, millions more:
[Y]esterday, Iraq became the most democratic country in the Arab world. What a pity that so many writers who, in other circumstances, are optimists about human progress, should shut their eyes to what is happening. In their determination to say "I told you so", they are coming perilously close to siding with jihadi murderers. Shame on them.
| Jan. 30, 2005 | 9:07 PM