The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Compare and Contrast

So I kind of told Regina I'd do a political post today in honor of the Iraqi elections. But first, I'd like you all to witness Darth Fuzzy's pictorial debut. Woot.

That having been said, let's talk about Iraq for a bit.

I've got a whole host of things I want to say on the subject, but let's start by noting the vast numbers of Iraqis that showed up and voted in the elections with a considerable amount of pride, risking life and limb to do so. Pretty much no matter who ends up winning said elections, the mere fact that they showed up and did so is worth an awful lot. In the sense that our two biggest goals in Iraq are to do in as many insurgents as we can, and set up a working democratic government, this is very very good.

Switching to a slightly different yet related topic, I've complained a lot in the past about not really knowing what's going on in Iraq. As far as the specifics of Iraqi party politics and such goes, I still don't have a whole lot of clue or much idea on where to get one. On the other hand, it's a relatively unique feature of our war in Iraq that US soldiers can actually blog from there. So I've been reading a number of them on a fairly regular basis, including this one, this one, this one, and few others besides. There's a lot I could say about them, but for the moment I'll just note that, while none of them is exactly clairvoyant about what's going on, these people know more about it than I do, and so there's a lot to be learned from reading them on a whole variety of issues.

I guess most importantly to where I think I'm going with this is that most if not all of them feel completely screwed over by media coverage of the war, their roles in it, and what they're trying to accomplish - namely killing bad people and making Iraq safe for democracy. And to hear most of them tell it, they think they're honestly accomplishing something. Filter that how you like, but given the elections turnout, I'm inclined to believe that Iraq may well be going much better than one might otherwise think.

Which makes one wonder how many things get spun in a bad light in the media just because George W. Bush believes in doing them, and in the last four years we've just sort of come to reflexively bash Bush every time he opens his mouth.

Which doesn't exactly make me feel better about the whole election thing in any case, but.

Anyway. One of the interesting contrasts for me during this whole thing, and maybe this is just me being too much the detached historian, but how different this whole thing in Iraq has been from our last big adventure in nation building, Vietnam. A few things to note about that:

1. In Vietnam, the opinion of US soldiers of both military and civilian South Vietnamese was generally pretty low. In Iraq, for whatever reason, the opposite seems to be the case. We seem to be happy enough to work with the Iraqi police and army, and relations with civilians seem to be about as good as they can be under the circumstances, in the words of the forementioned US soldiers. Having read Vietnam/Iraqi vets talk about the subject, the attitudes are very very different.

2. I haven't got a whole lot of reference for this, but from what I can tell, Iraqi confidence in their own government/electoral process/whatever is reasonably high. Contrast this to, say, Diem, Ky, or any SVN leader you want.

3. I had a 3, but I forgot it. And since we're getting pretty long, I'll cut off here. Tune in next time for...we'll see, but probably Laurent guest blogging my adventures on the obstacle course, complete with pictures.

Posted by Dwip at January 31, 2005 5:01 PM