'Alarmed that the
disqualification of hundreds of candidates from upcoming parliamentary elections threatens to derail Iraq's fledgling democracy, the Obama administration is dispatching Vice President Biden in hopes of defusing the looming political crisis.'
7 comments :
Sending Biden is laughable in the extreme. Remember what Biden said back in 2007? No? Okay, let me refresh your memory (2007 review here):
Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the day before hearing the testimony by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, already dismissed the results. "I really respect him, but I think he's dead flat wrong," Biden said about General Petraeus on September 9, 2007. After two days of testimony, Senator Biden was still not persuaded that the new strategy was working. In an interview a few days after the hearing, Senator Biden said, "I give the strategy no chance of succeeding. Zero."
Yep, that was Biden, the guy Obama is now sending to Iraq. Great. Listen, I'm glad they're sending someone. But is Biden really the best person for this task? If Obama were really concerned, he should go himself. Hey, it might help him forget for a few hours the brutal ass-kicking he received from the voters in Massachusetts the other day.
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Mojo,
By the way, that first comment was directed toward the general reader, of course, and not you in particular. You know as well as I do everything that happened in 2007.
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Yes Jeffrey, I remember Biden's pessimism. I remember many liberals' general pessimism and calls for immediate withdrawal at a critical time.
Maybe Biden learned something. I think he understands that America has put too much effort into Iraq to see it fail in democracy.
I think this ban by Cahalbi & crew was a stupid move. It has only made Saleh al Mutlaq more famous and he'll probably get more votes as a result of this.
Mojo,
The good news for Iraq has been that the Obama administration has not pulled out precipitously from Iraq. It has more or less followed what Bush himself would have done. I too hope that Biden is able to persuade the current Iraqi administration to reduce the number of banned candidates.
I think this ban by Cahalbi & crew was a stupid move. It has only made Saleh al Mutlaq more famous and he'll probably get more votes as a result of this.
To be honest, I haven't followed this latest snag very closely, but I can't disagree with your assessment here. Iraq Pundit, I imagine, would agree with you that the ban is bad for a variety of reasons. An election that is seen as legitimate is essential to Iraq's future. Too much effort to stabilize Iraq over the last few years has been expended to have a dumbass move now de-legitimize the elections results.
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Jeffrey,
I just visited your blog and saw the comments are gone :O
Did haloscan shut down completely or something?
C.H.,
Haloscan was sold to a company called Echo and they asked for a yearly fee for a new commenting system that would also transfer and maintain the old comments. I wasn't willing to put up the cash, so I let it drop.
Through my old Haloscan account, however, I am able to export all the old comments, if I want. IBC had around 14,000 comments. Haloscan allows me to export all of those 14,000 comments to Word files. So far, I've downloaded a few thousand and it works fine.
Back when I started IBC, I liked the Haloscan comment template much better than Blogspot's (more attractive than Blogger's in-house product), but I hadn't planned on Haloscan one day discontinuing its free commentary. In hindsight, I guess, it would have been better to stay with Blogger's comment system.
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Biden's not the only one who thought Iraq hopeless back in 2006-7. I, along with a lot of other people, thought so too. I also thought that Biden's plan to divide Iraq into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish areas and then for the US to withdraw was the right course. I am glad that we were wrong and that Bush Jr., Gates and Gen Petraus were right and took their own course and stuck to it despite a lot of domestic pressure.
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