No, not the people who helped Saddam loot Iraq and pocketed
billions from the Oil-for-Food-for-Bribes-for-Weapons program.
Sharpies: those wonderfully-handy felt-tipped pens with permanent
ink that my wife continues to swipe from my desk. The Afghan
election — an otherwise wonderful and historic event — is now in
dispute because the U.N. didn’t have Sharpies handy.
Laugh if you must, but the humor of this can only be appreciated
by the overpaid bureaucrats of Turtle Bay. The U.N. was supposed to
be monitoring and assuring the validity of the Afghan election in
which Hamid Karzai and about seventeen others were vying for the
presidency of this war-ravaged nation. The U.N. failed. Not because
of violence in the polling places, though there surely was some.
Not because hundreds of thousands of Afghanis quailed at the
terrorists’ threats of murder if they tried to vote, because they
didn’t. The U.N. failed because its infallible, impartial, and
professional election monitors planned to mark the cuticle of one
thumb of each voter with ink to show they’d voted and thus prevent
them from voting again, and couldn’t manage to get even that right.
You’d think they’d have arranged for pens with ink that wouldn’t
wash off immediately, rendering the result in doubt of massive
Chicago-like vote fraud. But they didn’t. It’s as if the U.N.
election monitors had been trained by former Louisiana gov Edwin
Edwards. In truth, that would probably have been an
improvement.
In the fall of 2001, Afghanistan sat under the oppression of the
Taliban, UBL and the Pakistani Intelligence Service that kept it in
the sorry condition it had been since the Soviets withdrew in
defeat. After September 11, the reign of the Taliban was brought to
an abrupt end, al Qaeda was almost destroyed, and OBL was on the
lam. In just three years, Afghanistan went from a nation that had
never in its history allowed its people self-determination, to one
in which — despite the strictness of Islamic law that still
dominates much of its people — millions voted. The picture on the
front page of Sunday’s Washington Post said it all: a
woman, garbed head to toe in a burqa, only her hands visible,
pushing her paper ballot into a ballot box. According to one
report, pollsters weren’t able to get good exit polls because the
Afghanis were reveling in their ability to keep their votes
secret.
That the U.N. couldn’t manage even this simple thing leaves me
wondering just what role it can possibly play in the January
elections in Iraq. Let’s help. Every American (and everyone else
interested in seeing democracy take root in Iraq) should send a
Sharpie to Secretary Kofi Annan (Hizzoner Kofi Annan, Secretary
General, U.N. Headquarters, First Avenue at 46th Street, New York,
NY 10017). Maybe by this little act of charity we can help prevent
in Iraq the same buffoonery that just occurred in Afghanistan.
Don’t send nasty letters. Just a little note saying we’re trying to
help the U.N. do what it obviously can’t do on its own.
THANK HEAVEN THAT the U.N. played no role in the Australian
election last week. Prime Minister John Howard, who braved enormous
political opposition to do it, joined Mr. Bush’s Coalition of the
Willing, and sent Aussie troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. His
survival was long in doubt but the Aussies reelected him with a
substantial margin of victory. Now, maybe President Bush can
mention his name again with prominence in the final debate against
Vichy John Kerry. Aussie liberals are shocked by their loss. Maybe
they should think about it more. Their message didn’t fail with the
voters because it wasn’t clear enough, or because they didn’t
articulate it well or loud enough. It failed because Aussies are
practical people. They don’t want terrorism at home, so they’re
willing to fight it at its source. So must we.
Two out of the four elections that should affect the war on
terrorists and the nations that support them have passed, and but
for the U.N. screw-up, both would stand as a powerful message to
the enemy. The effect of the January Iraqi election will depend on
what happens here in November. If Mr. Bush wins, terrorism will
remain on the run. If Kerry prevails, we will suffer an enormous
setback.
Kerry’s “plan” for Iraq is in tatters. He says — and John
Edwards reiterated on Meet the Press on Sunday — that the
Iraq war is the wrong war, at the wrong time and in the wrong
place. Kerry’s principal idea, to bring in those nations that have
so far refused to join in the fight, has only meant one thing. In
his awesome egotism, Kerry believes that just because he is who he
is, France and Germany — and perhaps even Russia — will send
troops to relieve the burden we have shouldered. It’s false, like
so much else Kerry and Edwards say. Chirac and Schroeder have
already said that they won’t send troops no matter who the
President may be on 21 January 2005. Kerry says that if we do this
right, we can begin to withdraw our troops in six months, and be
out of there in four years.
Mr. Kerry objects to fighting this war on the terms it must be
fought in order to win. We can’t fail to build the bases in Iraq
we’re now building, but he’d stop the construction. If we lack
those bases, then any further action in the Middle East — against
Iran and Syria — will be much harder to accomplish when Kerry’s
successor takes office. He wants to stop the program that’s
developing tactical nuclear penetrating bombs that can destroy
Iran’s buried nuclear weapons program untouchable by conventional
weapons. Mr. Kerry wants to bring the troops home from this war,
just as he did in the Vietnam War. Someone should remind him that
we lost that one thanks to him, Hanoi Jane, and their ilk.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe Are Worse
Than You Think (Regnery Publishing).
