Voting Rights

Steven Vincent, author of "Into the Red Zone", one of the essential books about the situation in Iraq, also writes In the Red Zone, another of the essential blogs about Iraq today.

After interviewing Vincent - who described himself as a New York liberal who has never been much of a George Bush fan - he has become one of my favorite pundits, period.

Read ITRZ's excellent election coverage. THere are several posts, and they're excellent.

And then read the analysis.

Vincent notes:

What to look for in the next few days: Sunni voting results from areas not under threat of terrorism. If we can determine that Sunnis would have voted if not in fear of their lives, then we can gauge the measure of their committment to democracy. If, as I suspect, it is high, then we must immediately replace the concept of a "Sunni boycott" with "Sunni vote suppression." Boycotts are voluntary acts of non-participation; suppression is when you use force to prevent someone from acting. And if terrorists and their clerical allies suppressed voting, then doesn't that "de-legitimize" their claim to represent Sunni Arabs? In this case, contending that Sunnis didn't vote because they supported Zarqawi and the Muslim Scholars Association would be like saying blacks didn't vote in the post-bellum South because they agreed with Jim Crow and the KKK.

Vincent has also had the stomach to surf some of the leftybloggers.

He quotes Kos:

And what of our friends on the Left? I'm sorry they can't share in our joy--because there is no reason they should not. Alas, like the Muslim Scholars Association, they, too, decided to "boycott" the elections. For example, here is what the great lefty website Daily Kos had to say yesterday:

The war is long past lost. Time to pack it in, and save the lives of our men and women in uniform that will otherwise face a barrage of bullets and RPG rounds during their extended stay in the desert.

Clearly, Dean-shill Marko Zuniga has an odd perception of liberalism. On a day when millions of Iraqi citizens stood up against the specter of fascism to exercise their rights as free and dignified human beings, Zuniga claims the election is "simply an exercise in pretty pictures." Tell that to the Iraqis who danced and cried for joy at the chance to vote, Mr. Zuniga. Tell that to people who have suffered for decades under a tyrant whose crimes were brutal to the point of madness. Tell that to the men and women who died to make this day a reality.

Kos' reaction to the election may be worse than his infamous "screw 'em" column; in last spring's outrage, he spat on the graves of four volunteers; today, he has crapped on 1,400 US and coalition graves, the unmarked mass graves of a million Iraqis killed by Hussein, and the self-determining future of the vast majority of 25 million living Iraqis.

Screw him.

Posted by Mitch at January 31, 2005 06:25 AM | TrackBack