The U.S. was impressed by Vietnam vote turnout too

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Edgewood
FooSlinger

Joined: Jan 28, 2004
Posts: 3906
Location: Colonial Shanghai

Posted: Feb 04, 2005 - 03:12 PM
Post subject: The U.S. was impressed by Vietnam vote turnout too

Back in 1967, the New York Times published a story entitled "U.S. encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror". The story was talking about the presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet government during the Vietnam war, saying that the Americans were "surprised and heartened" by the size of the turnout "despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting".

A successful election, it went on, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam", the same media propaganda we saw this week in covering the Iraqi elections.

Since Sunday elections, media reports have been trying to convince people that the so-called land mark elections in Iraq has ended the U.S. occupation and that the Iraqis have finally won their freedom and democratic rights.

How can one call this election free or fair, given the brutal reality of occupation, martial law, a U.S.-appointed election commission and secret candidates who were rarely been allowed to get in the way of the hype.

This has been a multi-layered campaign, reminiscent of the pre-war WMD frenzy and fantasies about the flowers Iraqis were collecting to throw at the invasion forces. If truth is the first casualty of war, reliable numbers must be the first casualty of an occupation-controlled election. The second layer of spin has been designed to convince people that a huge number of the Iraqis have participated.

At first, election officials claimed that 72% of those registered have actually voted, but then the figure was downgraded to 57%.

Now the question is what percentage of the adult population is registered to vote?
According to UN sources, there has been no registration or published list of electors – what was said is that 14 million people were entitled to vote.

As for expatriate Iraqis, the up to 4 million strong exiled community (with perhaps a little over 2 million entitled to vote), only 280,000 people registered to vote. Of those, 265,000 actually voted.

The American President George W. Bush and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair made heroic speeches on Sunday’s elections implying that Iraqi people voted to approve the occupation.

Those who believe that the U.S. is desperate for an exit strategy are misreading the occupation’s intentions. With the construction of more military bases in Iraq, the U.S. is digging in to install and back a long-term puppet government.

An inevitable fact is that the Iraqi people have become increasingly united in their determination to put an end to the brutal, illegal occupation, regardless to whether they voted in the country’s elections or not. Despite the U.S. occupation's attempts to dominate the Iraqis by inflaming sectarian divisions, this political bond will reassert itself, same as it did in Vietnam.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/review/article_full_story.asp?service _ID=6796

Hmmm... I quoted a source critical of the US. I must be an anti-freedom asssswiiiiipe, right?

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