Another Election Day

[selenite0]

I started crying yesterday as I saw the news coming in from Iraq (and scared the heck out of celticdragonfly until I got "Good news" through my choked throat). It's the pictures of the Iraqis who voted that got to me. These people know that Zarqawi proclaimed that anyone participating in the election was an apostate and marked for death. But they're not just voting, they're letting their pictures be taken so the whole world can see they voted, daring the enemy to come get them. I think these people aren't going to be satisfied with just voting once. My optimism about the future of the experiment feels a lot more justified now.

I'm still not as optimistic as Robert Wright's latest piece in the NYT. He's convinced me that the forces of history favor freedom, but it's not going to happen if we sit back and wait for history to bring it to us on a platter. It takes lots of hard work to create freedom, lots more than creating a slight-improved dictatorship. History supports that by giving big rewards to free people. But that doesn't make the first step any easier. It takes hard decisions, hard work, and a willingness to take great risks. As those voters did.

Comments

"street cred"

[btripp.livejournal.com]

"Zarqawi proclaimed that anyone participating in the election was an apostate and marked for death"

You know, this reminds me of something that I was thinking yesterday ... I wonder how much the "Arab Street" is like the "urban street" in terms of "street cred". Zarqawi and the like have been "promising" big things and delivering zilch. What happened during the voting? I wasn't exactly keeping a tote board, but I seem to recall there being 8 suicide bombs and a few mortar attacks, with something like 24 casualties all told. Not to belittle 24 deaths, but that's not much different from any other day in Iraq, if memory serves.

Heck, we even got the guys who fired that rocket into the Embassy ... bet they were surprised when the Rangers kicked down their door!

At what point do guys like Zarqawi become a joke to the other over-excitable diaper-brains? He promised that "the streets would flow with blood", but only manged to sucker less than a dozen imported "martyrs" into blasting themselves to bits (and at that, mainly outside of the security perimeters!). What's the Islamic version of "all hat, no cattle" ... "all blab, no boom"? At what point does Uncle Osama & co. stop writing checks to fund The Jihadis That Couldn't Shoot Straight?

I think there should be a psyops campaign of publicly mocking these losers, as I bet they'd hate that even worse than being forced to eat pineapple-ham pizza while watching Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS!


(http://www.btripp.com)

Re: "street cred"

[archangelbeth]

Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines myself. I think he's in a too target-rich environment now. How many people voted? And got away with it?