As is his/her standard practice, Gosh has come to my site and posted somebody else's words in what I have to assume is supposed to be a stinging rebuke and rubbing of my face in the facts. The left loves to gloat over the problems in Iraq. Nothing like schadenfreude over your own country's military setbacks to demonstrate some real patriotism.
I'm guessing it's from here:
"When an occupying force is seen by a sufficient number of the people as an unwelcome occupier to be opposed, then there’s no way that occupier can be responsible for creating and maintaining order."
There's no way? Wow, I'm glad that's a total certainty, and that Atrios can be counted on to speak with such sweeping authority on all human affairs. Well, ok, I can't forget the word “sufficient,“ though. I guess that makes this statement pretty weak, really. Of course, the implication is that a sufficient number of people in Iraq do consider the US unwelcome and to be opposed and thus stability there is impossible.
All I can say to respond to the ever pompous platitudes emitted by Atrios is to point to Saddam. Did the Shi'ite majority of Iraq consider his leadership unwelcome and wish to oppose it? I'd speculate they did. But he imprisoned, killed and tortured sufficient numbers of them that they remained largely orderly.
The fact is, it's not impossible to maintain order in a society of people who dislike and oppose you. It's very possible. It happens all the time. It's just not easy, and the least difficult routes to it aren't at all pretty.
In any case, as brilliant as Atrios finds him/herself, this quote is a dramatic oversimplification of the problems we face in Iraq right now. Atrios would have us believe that the strife over there is because they want us out. That any Iraqi who wants us out also hates us and wants to do violence against us. In reality, the violence is much more attributable to deliberate attempts by AQ to stir up sectarian conflict, and to drive us out by creating chaos and thus appealing to people like Atrios. Certainly it's native Iraqis doing the majority of the fighting over there, but were it not for deliberate provocations by AQ, the situation would be much different.
This isn't lost on the average Iraqi. Just because an Iraqi feels we should leave, it doesn't mean they hate us or want to attack us. It's much more likely that they recognize that AQ has built up there in response to our presence, is trying to get us to leave, and sees killing Iraqi civillians as the means to that end. All of Anbar province has turned on AQ. They're much less popular there than we are. But they follow us around, Iraqis know this, and they'd prefer we'd all just go. More on this after the next quote...
"Both the American public and the Iraqi public want us to leave Iraq. However, both the American government and the Iraqi government want us to stay. So we’re staying. This is called 'democracy promotion.'"
The polls are most likely right on this... Most people lack the resolve and stomach to do what's right, and prefer to do what's easy. Polls taken in 1941 showed that 80% of Americans opposed involvement in WWII. If the public is so damn smart, then why were 80% of them wrong there? And if listening to the public's opinion on wars is what defines democracy, then how come FDR, the Presidet who disagreed with 80% of the country on WWII, is the only President to be elected to three terms in office?
I don't blame Iraqis for wanting us out. I just don't think it's in their best interests. I hope that their leadership can do better on their behalf, and in doing so prove to them that they need to stick it out now to make the region better in the future.
In any case, losing elections has caused Democrats to start pretending that Democracy is poll driven. It's not about voting, electing people, and then judging their actions at the ballot box... It's about the BBC polling people, then enacting policy directly from the poll results. That's democracy! Right? Right?
How about no? How about you're a fucking moron? If Maliki wants us to stay, and the Iraqi people don't, then lets see what happens to him next election? If the American people don't like this war, and it's SO very obvious, then how come Democrats in Congress are forced to back off of attempts to defund the war for fear of looking unpatriotic? If the American people hate this war so much, they'll vote that way in 2008.
No matter how the public feels about something, that doesn't change the way our government works or how democracies in general work. You get to vote for President every four years. Not at random, when you feel like having a poll. Every four years. That IS democracy. Media conducted polls aren't.
I just conducted a poll of my basement asking who thinks all Democrats in the United States should have to stop being such pandering fuckwits, and a stunning 100% of respondants said they should. And that's with zero margin of error. Get to work on that right now, idiots.
"We simply can't want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there. That poll of Iraqis, conducted by the BBC and other news organizations, found that only 22 percent of Iraqis support the presence of coalition troops in Iraq, down from 32 percent in 2005.
If Iraqis were pleading with us to stay and quell the violence, maybe we would have a moral responsibility to stay. But when Iraqis are begging us to leave, and saying that we are making things worse, then it’s remarkably presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely because, as President Bush termed it in his speech on Tuesday, 'it is necessary work.'"
Again, the left likes to cling to whatever works for it at that moment. When the electoral college defeated Gore in 2000, they thought it was a foolish idea, antiquated and no longer worth having. In 2004, when Bush won more votes than any President before him, but the electoral college might have afforded Kerry victory, the left wanted investigations in key states that might give them a win through the very mechanism that was so passe four years previous.
Now that they can find polling data that supports their ideology, they've decided that diplomacy isn't conducted between governments, but instead between whomever agrees with them and whomever else agrees with them. Maliki wants the US to stay. He's the Prime Minister of Iraq. He's who we talk to. He's the legitimate, democratically elected leader of Iraq. Liberals whine and whine about how we work with rebels to depose democratically elected leaders that we don't favor. But when somebody holds views they don't agree with, the first thing that pops into their idiot heads is to do just that.
When you're trying to stand up a democracy, you don't undercut the duly elected leader by ignoring his policy and asking his people what they want.
But that's not interesting to the left. In their world “democracy” is them getting what they want. If they're not getting what they want, preferrably immediately, then somebody, somewhere, must be ignoring the fundamental concepts upon which this nation was built.