If "They" Haven't Reported the News Yet...

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=20572

Iraq's Day of RejoicingBy Michael ReaganFrontPageMagazine.com December 16, 2005

Michael Sitto said it best. Sitto, a La Mesa, CA. expatriate Iraqi who works for the U.S. Navy told reporters as he prepared to cast his absentee vote in the Iraqi elections: "It is a great day for the Iraqi people. This is the start of a new democratic system, a democratic country in the Middle East," he said. "At the same time, there has been a great sacrifice by the American people.”

And, he added, "We don't want to lose sight of that."

Too bad the Democrats and their Marxist allies here in the U.S. can’t see the miracle taking place in Iraq, where for the third time -- in spite of real and present dangers to life and limb -- huge numbers of Iraqis voted in a free election.

Like Sitto, Iraqis are rejoicing, and all Americans should be shouting Hallelujah along with them, because the miracle that is happening there is taking place because we made it happen.

For the very first time in the Middle East, a Muslim nation is creating a democratic republic – the people of an Arab nation are deciding for themselves the kind of government they want and which of their fellow Iraqis they want to run that government. For the first time, the people of a Muslim nation are acting like free citizens instead of as subjects of an autocratic regime.

This is a trailblazing development, and it is born and bred out of our own history. The very idea that a sovereign people could be self-governing was unheard of, yet that is exactly what the Founding Fathers insisted when they set up a constitutional republic and created a system of laws and not of men.

Today, confronted by the reality of an Iraqi electorate setting up a constitution that substitutes the rule of law for the rule of a dictator, and voting for candidates to serve in a national legislature, liberal Democrats sneer at the astounding progress democracy has made in Iraq. They predict that all sorts of terrible problems will arise and doom Iraq’s hopes for a free and stable government.

Of course, there will be problems. Putting together a conglomeration of groups with widely divergent ideas and modes of living is a tough row to hoe, and our own history provides many examples of the obstacles involved in the process. It took ten years for America just to reach the point where it was possible to craft a constitution.

In the wake of the American Revolution, the best the Founders could do was to operate under the weak and inefficient Articles of Confederation. Finally, ten years later, they met to create a binding Constitution. It took two years for Congress to adopt the document and another two years of contentious debate before the required majority of states approved the Constitution of the United States.

And that was just the beginning. It took a long time for some of the states to accept the idea that they were part of a national union and not individual nations. Some of the disputes actually involved armed resistance, such as the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. Later, the nation split apart over the issue of slavery and a terrible Civil War broke out.

In the end, however, we have survived for well over two centuries and today the United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the face of the earth. And because we set an example for all the world to follow over 200 years ago, the people of Iraq have today taken a giant step to follow in our footsteps.

Instead of walking around with the usual gloom and doom written all over their faces, leftists should be leaping with joy over the results of December 15, 2005. It is a time for rejoicing, even if it means that Howard Dean, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, and all the rest of the “Hate Bush brigade” will have to admit that President Bush knew what he was doing all along.

One Iraqi voter quoted in a story on the Drudge Report had a few words for the cut-and-run crowd: “Anybody who doesn’t appreciate what America has done and President Bush [has done] let them go to hell.”

That works for me.