SOTU: What Bush Doesn’t Mention About Iraq’s Elections
SOTU: What Bush Doesn’t Mention About Iraq’s Elections
Bush said: “In less than three years, that nation has gone from dictatorship, to liberation, to sovereignty, to a constitution, to national elections.â€
FACT — WHITE HOUSE WAS AGAINST IRAQI ELECTIONS BEFORE IT WAS FOR THEM: Before deciding to support Iraq elections, the Bush administration wanted to turn control over to the now-discredited Ahmad Chalabi. The Washington Post remembers, the White House “resisted the idea of holding elections…and only succumbed under pressure from Iraq’s most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.” Iraq expert Juan Cole noted, “It was Sistani who demanded one-person, one-vote elections. So to the extent it’s a victory, it’s a victory for Iraqis. The Americans were maneuvered into having to go along with it.” [Washington Post, 1/30/05]
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LIke he was against the 9/11 commission before he was for it.
January 31st, 2006 at 9:33 pmFlip-flop.
This is really a key point that no one really harps on….time and time again with all the negative reports coming out of Iraq the one thing the Republicans/Neo-Cons fall back on (really the only thing they can fall back on) is that the Iraqis had “free and fair elections”
I bet the American public would like to know that the White House intially wanted to spread democracy to the Middle East by appointing “their” guy Chalabi….
The entire Republican party is a fraud
February 1st, 2006 at 9:42 amPresident Bush did have a plan for locally elected city councils and other local leaders to elect the transitional assembly in early 2005. This is the plan that they were forced to changed. They like many in our congress and others around the world did not feel that the security situation in January of 2005 would produce an election that would be safe and include representatives from many of the more insecure parts of Iraq. The January 2005 election was a wonderful event but many of those that are opposed to the war in Iraq used the low turn-out due to fear in some areas to try to make that election look bad. This is all irrelavent to the election of December 15, 2005 underthe new constitution.
February 1st, 2006 at 7:52 pm