Some liberal-left journalists are claiming that the reported voting percentages of 57% in the recent election in Iraq are inflated and are drawing parallels to meaningless elections that took place in Vietnam and El Salvador during the American involvements in those countries. I don't know about the voter percentage numbers, but it is clear that the Iraqis had good reason to go to the polls on Sunday, and I share the admiration of their bravery considering that they were under threat and that there were in fact 175 (actually as high as 260, depending on sources) insurgent attacks intended to disrupt the vote, a fact that went largely unreported here.
There is no question that the election was a significant event for Iraq and for the entire region. I doubt whether it will stop the insurgent attacks, however, and there is still a very good possiblity of the kind of internecine conflict that will make the election irrelevant in the long run. I am not an expert on confessional divisions in that part of the world, but the likelihood of a shiite theocracy in Iraq also seems to me to be strengthened. None of which, it goes without saying, prevents the American president from claiming a huge success in Iraq by virtue of the election having occurred, even though he was against it and it was actually the ayatollah in Najaf who forced the hand of the occupation authority to hold elections at this time.
Apart from that, I have no further comments about the Iraqi election. I am sick of the whole bloody blundering business, and wish to express my gratitude for the fact that nobody reads this blog anyway. I will add only that this is a place for me to say what I really think, and what I really think is that Michael Jackson is an irrelevant distraction and I have nothing to say about him or his theme park, and that is why I removed the picture of the bulldozer that was linked in below. (Explanation added for the benefit of the millions of blog readers who eagerly ignore my immortal words.)
I think that Fluorescent Elephant is a transcendantly wonderful notion, and could be an important one if it were properly implemented, but today I'm just not sure that I'm the one who can do it. Fortunately, it doesn't much matter, since there are 4,999,999 other blogs for people with nothing better to do to read.
