Iraq The Model And The U.S. Mid-Terms

If numbers of comments mean anything, ITM is one of the most energizing of all the blogs in the world. This article was posted on the 10th and already has 197 entries. It shows the interest of the world in what's going down there, and the fabulous ability to keep up with personal experiences, thoughts and feelings in the larger world events, tragic and hopeful, through the internet.

What I love about their (Omar and Mohammed's) writing is the straight-forward attitude of cautious hope. With every setback, every frustrating paliamentarian delay, every inexplicable governmental error, even loss of loved ones, they simply know that Iraq has been handed a special oppurtunity by the people of the United States, to give the greater Middle Eastern nations a "model" of Muslim Democracy.

In this column, Mohammed gives his general impression of how the US mid-terms are being discussed in the area. He says it's unusual that the mid's are discussed at all, and the ramifications are as controversial there as here. At first, the aspect of a truce was hailed as a victory for Iran and Syria. However, the need for those regimes to fence the US into an area labelled "The Enemy" forced those neighbors to warn folks that the American Democrats are even "closer to Israel" than are the Republicans!

My money quote:

I would like to remind again that claiming that America's policies are the cause of anti-Americanism is crap, because the hatred is for the nature of the American democratic system which contrasts the nature of regimes here.
That explains why there's rarely an opposition to China or Russia in the middle east and that's because neither has a systems that threatens the totalitarian ideology of governance that prevail in the Arab world.