January 04, 2005
Puppets Revolt!
Boy, when your own puppets begin to question your decisions, you're really in trouble. More awful news out of Iraq today. The governor of Baghdad (!) and five U.S. troops were killed by insurgents. It looks like things have gotten so bad that the president of Iraq wants someone to step in and take away the decision-making power of the U.S. (emphasis mine):
The steady violence prompted Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, to urge the United Nations to look into whether Iraq should go ahead with the scheduled Jan. 30 elections."Definitely the United Nations, as an independent umbrella of legitimacy, should really take the responsibility by seeing whether that is possible or not," Mr. al-Yawar, a Sunni Arab sheik, told Reuters in an interview.
"On a logical basis, there are signs that it will be a tough call to hold the election," he said, in comments that pulled back from a statement he made on a visit to Washington in December, when he and President Bush reinforced their message that elections must go ahead as scheduled, despite the violence.
Even the Iraqi president can see that the U.S. is, despite everything, still pushing ahead blindly to meet ill-fated and misguided ideological parameters in Iraq. The election, which they long ago decided would be held "in" January, they finally set for January 30th—as late in the month as possible in the hope that a miracle would happen. As my mother joked, "I'm sure they would have set the election for January 75th if they could get the extra days."
Now that that decision has been made, they're going to stick to it—even when everyone else involved, including the election observers, poll workers, the candidates, and the parties themselves, thinks it's a bad idea. As today's quotes show, they're increasingly willing to speak out. It's almost like they realize their lives and their country might depend on getting this thing back on track....
Todd, I'm thinking of you.
