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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Bad News for the Left: Iraq Heading Towards a Democracy |
| 2004-08-02 |
| This article is huge, so I am going to paste only about ten percent of it. Over a month into sovereignty, and Iraq still continues to generate a flood of bad news, at least as far as the mainstream media are concerned. Foreign workers keep getting kidnapped and occasionally executed; terrorist bombs continue to explode throughout Baghdad and other cities, although the victims are now overwhelmingly Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, learned commissions deliver their reports, providing the media with fresh opportunities to talk about intelligence failures and strategic blunders. Yet for every foreigner taken hostage there are stories of hundreds of Iraqis who can now enjoy in many different ways their regained liberty. For every attack, with all its terror and bloodshed, there are countless stories of courage, determination and resourcefulness on the part of the Iraqi people. And for every intelligence failure by the government agencies then, there is an intelligence failure by the media now. Which is why you are likely to have recently missed some of the stories below. • Society. Despite the best (or rather the worst) efforts of al Qaeda-affiliated jihadis and Baath Party nostalgics, Iraq is steadily moving in the direction of representative democracy. The national convention is yet another step towards the next year's elections.As another report explains, "Iraq's three-week-old government is selling debt to help pay local banks $3 billion of debt that dates from Saddam's rule and to reduce its reliance on international loans and revenue from oil. The government plans to hold twice-monthly auctions to raise as much as $1.2 billion by year-end. 'It shows the sophistication of the Iraqi banking system,' said Richard Segal, research director at Exotix, a London brokerage for emerging market securities, including Iraqi debt." |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #2 Interesting info, LH. I'm no supporter of the left, but it may make for an interesting read. I think we should discourage Leftism in Iraq until such time they may become a big time economic powerhouse. *Then* we push the Left agenda to rein them back in again. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2004-08-02 11:13:24 AM |
| #1 the genuine left, the left of christopher hitchens and Paul Berman, will celebrate the advent of democracy, and push for more of it, and will support the leftist, secular parties in Iraq, including the Iraqi Communist Party, Kurdish Socialist parties, etc. They will advocate the taxation of the stock market, etc to support social services, and a go slow approach to privatization. The parochial, isolationist, pacifist left will simply focus on whats going wrong, since their agenda is rather different. For a good introduction to these differences in leftism, with material going back to the split in the French left in the 1930's, see Paul Bermans "Liberalism and Terror". |
| Posted by: Liberalhawk 2004-08-02 9:25:44 AM |