NY Times is apparently sad that Iraqis can vote
In a galactically stupid, venal and venomous editorial this morning, the NY Times said this:
The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority.
If the NY Times can imagine a way that a minority in the United States comprising about 20-25% of the population could outvote the majority and call it just, proper and wise, I'd like to hear it.
But because the vote was granted in Iraq by the force of arms of the USA, and under a republican, no matter that their post victory tactical policies were remarkably stupid, the Times cannot HELP THEMSELVES but blame the FACT of a Shia majority in another nation on Bush.
We make not LIKE what Maliki is doing, but Maliki was chosen by others just as Chirac was chosen. That this fairly elected government in fact IS enabling Shia dominated sectarian violence may be our problem, but it is not our fault.
That nation must find IT'S way to nationhood or, like India and Pakistan do what must be done, but in the end, that MUST be up to them.
The Times then warps history ...
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam.
We'll never know that since Congress, with NO AMERICAN FIGHTING IN VIETNAM cut off all aid to South Vietnam, AFTER AMERICAN COMBAT FORCES WENT HOME.
ALL AID.
The NY Times well understands the REAL ISSUE.
A repeat of the scene at 22 Gia Long Street in April 1975, will mean a generation of Republican dominance AGAIN.
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