Iraqi Election Update
Helena Cobban says the progress of elections in Iraq are going "more or less" as good as she hoped. Well, let's just hope she's a hopeful person.
We don't just need good soldiers into good peacekeepers (that transition is difficult enough), but good soldiers into good poll workers:
"Can we truly expect that the US military - which has been highly trained for aggressive battlefield operations - can transform itself into a bunch of patient, politically savvy election midwives? Yes, we can and must. It would not, after all, be the first military to make that transformation. In 1989, South Africa's apartheid government ordered its ultra-tough military, which for more than a decade had been battling black nationalist rebels in the annexed territory of Namibia, to turn to the radically new mission of creating the conditions for a UN-sponsored, one- person-one-vote election there."
The column is here:
We don't just need good soldiers into good peacekeepers (that transition is difficult enough), but good soldiers into good poll workers:
"Can we truly expect that the US military - which has been highly trained for aggressive battlefield operations - can transform itself into a bunch of patient, politically savvy election midwives? Yes, we can and must. It would not, after all, be the first military to make that transformation. In 1989, South Africa's apartheid government ordered its ultra-tough military, which for more than a decade had been battling black nationalist rebels in the annexed territory of Namibia, to turn to the radically new mission of creating the conditions for a UN-sponsored, one- person-one-vote election there."
The column is here:
posted by hellisotherpeople at 10:32 AM
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