Debi White comments on Iraq elections

Blogging is like beachcombing.
Mostly you see the detrius washed up since you were last there, but sometimes you find a goodie.
I nearly missed this one. I would like to post the whole thing, but that would do the same thing to my blog that it did to her's. it would put a big scrolling multi-screen mass into view that would turn off a reader pressed for time. (Did I say anything about soundbites, yet? No, that's two posts down. I had to look.)

From the heart, you can tell.
And writing is a lot better that way than it is with a lot of links.
More soul, less clinical.

It really is amazing, watching the deeply flawed system of democracy take hold in a raw and decimated nation like a thorny weed cracking through shattered concrete. All people deserve to be free and now Iraqis have a tiny bloody taste of it and this is always, always a good thing. I am not kidding. [...]

How quickly we forget: A democratic Iraq was never the reason Bush forced us into this war. Iraq's fledgling democracy is a pleasant side effect, a bonus PR move, a heartstring-tugging and patriotic patina of bogus humanitarianism BushCo is now trying to slather over one of the most disastrous and inept military efforts in recent history. It makes for terrific photo ops. It makes for miserable and debilitating foreign policy. [...]

Let's just say it outright: The ends do not justify the means. A barely democratic Iraq is fine and good, but you well know that if Bush had mumbled to the nation three years and $300 billion ago that we were going to start bombing this piss-poor country back to the Stone Age and gut the U.S. economy and put thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in death's way to deliver it, all while sending the nastiest possible message to the world and actually increasing the threat of terrorism while turning our backs on every major U.S. ally, I doubt many Americans would have giddily waved the flag of support (except maybe Ann Coulter, who apparently loves anything involving guns and dead foreigners).

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