Iraq Elections Revisited

I happened across a couple stories out of the UK about studies that have been performed on young adults and on the elderly. The first begins, "The belief that older people are outperformed by the young has been proven wrong when it comes to being able to appreciate the big picture." Apparently, as we get older, we're more able to process differing pieces of information and have it coalesce into a unified whole. This would probably be the factor involved in developing wisdom.

The second story begins, "Young people are risk-takers because their brains do not fully develop until much later than had been thought, a new study has found." This allows young people to make quick decisions, such as moving out of the family home "without wasting energy worrying about it." Slow, thoughtful decision-making or analysis is not the forte of the young.

And this brings me to the Iraq elections. Sami Ramadani, a political refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime and a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University, wrote a column for The Guardian, a very Left-leaning newspaper in London(hat tip: WorldNetDaily). In it he compared the Iraq elections of this past Sunday to the elections held in Vietnam in 1967. Here is his opening paragraph:

On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on residential
elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading "US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror", the paper reported that the Americans had been "surprised and heartened" by the size of the turnout "despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting". A successful election, it went on, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam". The echoes of this weekend's propaganda about Iraq's elections are so close as to be uncanny.

The Guardian doesn't say how old Ramadani is, but based on the tunnel-vision of his analysis, I would suspect he's a lot closer to 25 than to being elderly. He implies that, because Vietnam in 1967 had great voter turnout in spite of threats by the Vietcong, and because Iraq had great voter turnout Sunday in spite of threats by the terrorists, that the end result in Iraq will be the same dismal result as in Vietnam. And the reason for his prediction is that the U.S. is the occupying force in both situations. He states, "The facts on the ground, including the construction of massive military bases in Iraq, indicate that the US is digging in to install and back a long-term puppet regime."

A long-term puppet regime? We're trying to ensure that Iraq doesn't get puppetized. While the potential certainly exists for a Vietnam-style outcome in Iraq, that outcome will only materialize if America loses her will to see this war in Iraq through to stable peace. That's what happened in Vietnam. When Walter Cronkite declared our victory in the Tet Offensive to have been a defeat for the U.S., the rest of the media and the Left joined in to hammer the Johnson and Nixon administrations, until the general public believed that victory in Vietnam was both pointless and unattainable. The icing on the poisoned cake was when the Democrat-controlled Congress refused to fund the promised defense of South Vietnam. These are the factors that led to the fall of Vietnam, but the Left refuses to acknowledge them.

If the far-Left has its way, its mouthpieces in the mainstream media will relentlessly attack President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, the military's method of conducting the war in Iraq, and anything else they can find to attack in order to bring down the Bush administration and the Republican party. It looks to me as though the far-Left is populated by people whose brains never fully developed properly, because the Left wants Iraq to turn into Vietnam, so they can claim a rhetorical or political victory.

But we must not falter. We must let the grown-ups, not the short-sighted, direct the war in Iraq as well as the greater War on Terror. We must win, not only the war, but also the peace and stability of Iraq. And the best course to that win is by keeping our resolve and standing with our Commander-In-Chief.