Posted on 10/29/2004 5:39:42 AM PDT by OESY
...[T]he thousands of academics, lawyers, rights advocates, and other educated elites leading the effort to create a new Iraq... have hitched their fortunes to our own and nearly all of whom hope that President Bush wins.
...These, after all, are the Iraqis building institutions, occupying key positions in ministries, and cooperating openly with the U.S. And they're the Iraqis with the most to lose in the event John Kerry makes good on his pledge to "bring the troops home where they belong."...
Such fears haven't been spun out of whole cloth. As far as Iraqi elites are concerned, President Bush brought democracy to a land that knew only dictatorship. From Sen. Kerry, however, they hear no commitment to build a liberal state or, for that matter, any state. What they hear instead is a presidential aspirant who complains about "opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America," even as his campaign aides dismiss Iraq's prime minister as an American "puppet."
...By advancing the fiction that there's no such thing as bringing the troops home too soon and nothing to justify an adequate level of expenditure in Iraq, he's already signaled his willingness to forfeit America's obligation to rebuild the country it turned inside out. And he offers this as heightened moral awareness.
But if John Kerry, who famously demanded that the U.S. "stop this blind commitment to a dictatorial regime" in Vietnam, imagines history repeating itself in Iraq, he really ought to visit the place. Having passed through eight time zones and one looking glass, what he will find is not the reactionary playground of his fantasies, but a country where thousands of idealistic young men and women go to work each day in the hope of creating a democratic society....
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Bush voters in Iraq **ping**
Bump!
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