Arnie and Iraq.....Yesterday I went to vote. I did so even though I promised myself after the 2000 election that I would probably never vote again after the supreme court nullified my vote by appointing g-w as president.
Again, on this whole recall business, I wondered why I was being asked to vote again after my vote of last November was also being cancelled.
But I went anyway. Just before I stepped into the voting booth they handed me this long, rectangular-shaped ballot. I found the recall part right away but had to look three times before I located Cruz Bustamante's name buried deep in the morass of names that appeared on the ballot.
As I blackened in the oval-shaped circle next to Cruz's name on the ballot I had this thought: Is this the kind of democracy we're trying to impose on the people of Iraq. Maybe the Iraqi people don't want to have anything to do with our "democratic"system. Maybe they would rather have a form of government other than what we know as democratic. Has anyone asked them? The Americans of course would like for the Iraqi government to be a carbon copy of the American Democracy. But again, maybe they don't want that. Maybe they want something else. They should at least be given a chance to express their preference for what kind of government they want.
Think about it: Here you have the country of Iraq that has been governing themselves, in one way or another, for 5,000 years. In marches the U. S. government, historically the latest in a long line of governments that have marched through and devastated and conquered that country and says, "We're going to give you a democracy."
Shouldn't we let the iraqi citizens decide what kind of government they would like to live under? Remember, five thousand years. That's how long they have been governing themselves. By my calculations that gives them about a 4,700 year head-start on how citizens should be governed. With that kind of an edge in the experience department, shouldn't g-w, paul bremmer, etal, be listening to their suggestions as to what kind of government they want?
czechmate: October 8, 2003
8:20:58 PM 
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