Chrenkoff acknowledges the continuing bad news from Iraq, but he returns with the seventh installment of the good news from Iraq: “Finish the job.”
Achieving a kind of blogger nirvana, Chrenkoff’s latest installment has been published simultaneously at OpinionJournal, whose title I have borrowed. Here, as someone once said (S.J. Pearlman?), is the beauty part:
Not content just with their own democratic process, Iraqis are becoming increasingly split on the US presidential election: “‘The Democratic party is just a party of slogans: they only call for freedom,’ says Muath Karra, an eyeglass salesman. ‘But George W. Bush, he is brave, and he is a man of action. I hope he wins this election, because he is a genius – and brave’. Muhammed Shammari, a taxi driver, is a Kerry man. ‘We want John Kerry to win, because George W. Bush brought harm to America and all the world under the pretext of launching the war on terror,’ he says. ‘And generally, the Democratic Party is better than Republicans’…
“Two months ago, independent Iraqi pollster Sadoun Dulame asked 3,075 Iraqis from all over the country which US candidate they preferred. Most Iraqis scorned the question, but about 15 percent responded passionately – almost all Bush backers.
“‘When we asked this 15 percent why they cared, they said, ‘Because the American election will affect conditions in Iraq,’ ‘ says Mr. Dulame, director of the Iraqi Center for Research and Strategic Studies. ‘They prefer that Bush stay. Because if Bush leaves, maybe the Democrats will adopt a new policy, and not pay so much attention to Iraq.’
“In a perfect reversal of US demographics, the Bush lovers tended to be more educated and clustered in cosmopolitan areas. Call them Red Iraqis. ‘Most of them were intellectuals,’ says Dulame. ‘US intellectuals, maybe most of them adopt Democratic values. But in Iraq, that’s the reality’.”
The early modern Westerners might have had the right idea that on the other side of the world things tend to be upside-down.
I wonder if an advertisement featuring the wisdom of Muath Karra might not be helpful to President Bush. In any event, Chrenkoff’s round-up carries much, much more of interest.
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