Saddam is such a wonderful leader....

[YogsVR4]

Official results from Tuesday's referendum showed that every one of Iraq's 11,445,638 eligible voters turned out to vote "Yes" to another seven-year term for Saddam, some marking their ballot papers in blood.

This wonderful information should spawn a few more Bush bashing threads because the people of Iraq have spoken and they couldn't be wrong.

[DVSNCYNIKL]

Originally posted by YogsVR4
This wonderful information should spawn a few more Bush bashing threads because the people of Iraq have spoken and they couldn't be wrong.

:hehehe::hehehe::hehehe:

[replicant_008]

Well, prima facie, the folk of Iraq have spoken as one and have endorsed their leader.

I don't know enough facts about the election process or the electoral college (ie who gets to vote) in Iraq to make observations about the representativeness of the process.

It doesn't mean Saddam is any more 'right' than anyone else even compared to the the US President who was voted in, in what appears to a external observer, to be a minority. (And that wasn't a slight against Bush or the US either - just an observation and IMHO, in most Western Democracies that usually a sign of healthy interest in the outcomes).

After all, history shows that there have been plenty of 'bad' leaders that were voted in by an overwhelming majority. And with the benefit/hindrance of 20/20 hindsight and revisionist history we can conclude that perhaps Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were not possibly the greatest choices for the German and Italian people in the middle part of the 20th Century.

I don't have a beef with Bush - IMHO I think he's bellicose and as the world's largest superpower he has to strike a balance. He needs to be careful - and he needs to be decisive where the situations warrant it (as opposed to some of the truly long-winded decisions from UN). It's not an easy job and we don't all have to agree with him all of the time. That's part of our right to hold differing opinions and our right to question our leaders in a free democracy.

In my part of the world, I think NZ and Australia made the 'right' decision in East Timor, for the sake of the defenceless East Timorese we had to go there and it could be argued we could have done it sooner to prevent some of the pointless bloodshed.

It's also been suggested that some recent events are 'payback' for that decision by some that disagreed with that decision. Every action has a consequence - even if we aren't conscious of the consequences all the time and that's something we in the west, Bush and his advisors have to consider.

[Jay!]

Do I understand correctly that Hussein was the only option on the ballot?



I'm sure most of them were just looking for the "I hate America" check box.

Also, I keep hearing, and perhaps drawing myself, the correlation between Hussein and Hitler; I think it's an interesting comparison. But, wasn't Hitler one of those instances where he won control by only one vote? Then just snowplowed everything after that...?

[jsb88]

There are probably not 11.5 million peole in Iraq...