The vote on Iraq's constitution is being haled as another step towards democracy, even while the resistance to the U.S. occupation and the violence supported by terrorists from outside Iraq and insurgents inside Iraq continues to escalate. On the day of the vote, a panel of journalists discussed the voting procedures in Iraq on Gwen Ifill's show on PBS. One of the women had filmed various polling sites during the day, and recounted her observation, recorded on film, of individual Iraqi voters taking multiple ballots, marking them, and handing them to the official ballot taker who dutifully stuffed all of them into the ballot box. The speaker thought the news about this recorded pattern of fraud, witnessed multiple times during just the short period of time that they had filmed, would ricochet across the discussions of the elections and remove any hope of credibility. Interestingly, the observation has apparently not been picked up by any other media. The Iraqi elections are reported as resulting in a 78% vote to support the constitution, with no reports about such easily observed balloting fraud. Perhaps it is too much to ask of US reports on the election, because of our vested interest in this election being legitimized as one more step towards a genuine democracy for the Iraqi people.
Lest we become too swayed by our own sketchy approach to truth and our tendency to overlook the most significant stories that are relevant to the determinations we are making, we should go back and look at Afghanistan. Remember that we invaded that country first, with the goal of ousting the Taliban who had supported Osama bin Laden's terrorist group and therefore were seen as directly culpable for the events of 9/11. We ousted the Taliban from Kabul and installed another government. But the few reports the media provide on Afghanistan suggest a government that is powerless to provide for its people and impotent in the face of the increasing empowerment of the brutal warlords who controlled Afghanistan before the Taliban. In fact, former Taliban leaders, involved in brutal enforcement of Islamic Sharia law, are also taking leadership positions again in the "new" "democratic" government. For a recounting of these problems, read the summary here, at the dissident voice website.
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