Not Nice, Ann

Quoting the usual suspects' predictions on Iraq, that is:

I remember what Kerry said during the campaign.... that this election wasn't going to happen.

Kerry specifically addressed the scheduled Iraqi elections in his closing statement at the first presidential debate, saying: "They can't have an election right now. The president's not getting the job done." (Kerry's a genius! He won the debate!)

A few weeks later, his campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, said: "It's not safe enough to have elections, which are scheduled in January. There is no way that people could go to the polls in that country right now."

In order to have free elections, apparently we would have to ... reach out to the French! "The Kerry plan," Cahill said, "would be to have an international consensus, not to go it alone, to get other countries into Iraq with us, so that we could carry out elections and we could move Iraq to be a free nation."

....In September, former president and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jimmy Carter said on NBC's "Today": "I personally do not believe they're going to be ready for the election in January ... because there's no security there."

Democrat moneyman George Soros said in a speech to the National Press Club last fall: "All my experience ... has taught me that democracy cannot be imposed by military means." ....Soros continued: "Iraq would be the last place I would choose for an experiment in introducing democracy."

....last September U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said he doubted there would be elections in January, saying, "You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now"....

Robert Fisk of The Independent (UK) told an audience in October 2004: "The chances of (January) elections are fading faster than water running into the desert." He said it was a "lie" that the allies were creating "an oasis of democracy with its center in Iraq."

....The Economist magazine said that until security in Iraq improves, "reconstruction will stall — and the hopes of Messrs. Allawi and Bush for a decent election, enabling a strong and legitimate government to take over, will continue to look uncertain to be fulfilled."

In October, Nicholas Lemann ... in The New Yorker: "The U.S. military in Iraq has started trying to take back areas of the country now controlled by insurgents, and it may not be safe enough there for the scheduled elections to be held in January."

The ink-stained finger, having voted, moves on.