Iraqi Election Must Have Meant Something

Besides already blogging the positive remarks from Around the World I wanted to provide more evidence that the Iraqi election actually meant something to the dismay of many "far left" liberals… The evidence is that the some are attempting to spin the successful election as a negative for President Bush - seriously!

The view that the elections are both the cause and effect of waning American influence in Iraq almost certainly contributed to the upbeat response in France and Iran, two of the countries where the U.S.-led invasion was deeply unpopular.

French president Jacques Chirac who led international opposition to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, told Bush on Monday that the elections constituted "a significant stage in the political rebuilding" of the country and a "partial defeat" for terrorists, according to the center-right daily Nouvel Observateur in Paris. The antiwar editors of Le Monde praised the courage of Iraqi voters and said it would be "indecent to reproach Bush for having offered free elections to the Iraqis. "

In Iran, the country that Bush has described as part of the "axis of evil," the headlines about the voting were almost unanimously positive, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. " Ballots defy bullets in Iraq," declared the Tehran daily Hashahri; "Terrorists fail," said Mardomsalari, a reformist newspaper. The vote "helps open a new chapter for Iraq," declared S. Sadeghi in a front-page commentary for the Iran Daily.

No, Bush's adversaries have not suddenly seen the neoconservative light. Rather, they believe that Iraqi voters have seized the elections as the best means of thwarting U.S. domination of the country. In the words of al Watan, a Saudi daily, cited in a BBC press survey, the hope is that the results, "will give the Iraqi authority a semblance of legitimacy and pave way for the withdrawal of the occupation."

Not to worry, so far the majority of the people I hear, some begrudged, know where the credit goes. Read the article here.