Over at Dean’s World, Dean repeats Weekend Pundit‘s question: How long after the Iraqi election before the New York Times proclaims them either a sham or a disaster?

In the course of the comments, though, the question changed. Assuming the MSM will declare the elections illegitimate no matter what, what would it take for you to truly believe they’re illegitimate?

I responded:

As others have pointed out, the MSM has more or less already decided that the elections are a sham/disaster, and I don’t see them changing their minds, though I’d love to be wrong on that.

The way I see it, the only way this election can be illegitimate is if there’s evidence of widespread fraud.

Supposing, say, that only 10% of the population shows up in the “safe” (relatively speaking) areas, and 5% shows up in the “unsafe” ones, that’s still better representation than the Iraqi people have ever gotten before.

The goal here shouldn’t be to make this a perfect election, though we obviously want it to be as good as possible. A truly independent, free Iraq in which the people have a say in the country (through a representative system, most likely, not a true democracy) isn’t going to happen overnight, and I don’t think anyone expects it to. (Though, the pessimists assume the optimists DO expect it, and will use that perception of expectation to condemn the election as a failure.) The fact is, as long as we can lay the groundwork for a better system in the future, I’m happy.

As Steven Den Beste wrote here:

What we are trying to do in the middle East is to make the Arabs stop blaming others, to make them stop thinking of themselves as helpless victims, and to make them face their failure, and to believe that they can become successes if they accept responsibility for their own fate and try to work to improve their situation. It is unlikely that we will initially create a full democracy in Iraq, but even a compromised system may be good enough to lay the seeds for later greatness.

It doesn’t matter if there is a perfect democracy in Iraq five years from now. We will have succeeded if there is a better democracy there in fifty years than there is in five years. We’re not trying to create a democracy in Iraq; what we’re trying to do is to get the Iraqis to want to make their lives better.

I fully expect to hear the Iraqi elections criticized no matter what the outcome is. If one vote is miscounted, or one person turns away from the polls because they’re afraid, the media will condemn the elections as a failure. “Every vote should count,” they’ll cry.

They’re right. Every person of voting age who wishes to vote should have his or her vote counted. The problem is, we don’t live in a world where what “should” happen actually does happen most of the time.

We hope that the elections will go off without the slightest hitch, but the reality is that it won’t happen. We know this because we live in an imperfect world. All we can do is the best we can, and if the Iraqi people get some say in their government, if they begin to understand that only they can take control of their own lives and make things better, we have succeeded.

An Iraqi election in 2005. Five years ago, that would have been unthinkable. Assuming that things don’t completely fall apart, this election will be a crown jewel in Arthur Chrenkoff‘s “Good News From Iraq” series.

A couple of years ago, I was one of the people who hated President George W. Bush. I couldn’t stand the man. He’d gone to war in Iraq for selfish reasons (oil, or because he wanted to finish what his dad started, or because he wanted revenge for Saddam’s failed attempt on his dad’s life, or…). There were no direct ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Ladin, so going to war with Saddam was nothing but unchecked aggression.

Then, after an argument on this topic, I realized that, honestly, I didn’t have any evidence to back up what I believed. I had a few theories that sounded halfway plausible, and a president who was obviously an idiot. That was good enough for me, until I suddenly realized it wasn’t.

While I’m actually relatively likely to roll my eyes at the liberal media, the news agencies didn’t actually affect my opinion. I’m almost ashamed to admit that, because I’m going to have to follow it by telling you what did shape my opinion: Wil Wheaton and Peter David. Two writers, both of whom I’d become familiar with through Star Trek. Wil Wheaton was, of course, the actor who played Wesley Crusher, and Peter David had written a number of Star Trek novels I’d loved long before I discovered that he was also writing a lot of the comics I liked.

Reading their blogs had convinced me that it was utterly impossible for a man to be both intelligent and good hearted while doing the things that the President was doing. Since, obviously, the President was doing those things, he must be both stupid and evil. (Never mind that I agreed with Bush’s tax cuts, even back then. Of course money in people’s pockets is better for the economy than money in Uncle Sam’s pockets, but it seemed pretty obvious that the President had stumbled onto this particular stroke of brilliance.) As much as I now hated Al Gore for his whining over the 2000 election*, I wished that he had actually won the election, and not just the popular vote (I never bought into the “selected, not elected” nonsense).

I began to wonder, though, how a stupid, evil man could rise to the Presidency of this nation so easily. I slowly came to believe that Bush was either stupid or evil, but not both. I believe it’s possible to mean well and convince the people to support you because you have a good heart, and I believe it’s possible to be evil and convince the people to support you because of your intelligence and charm. I don’t think it’s possible to be both stupid and evil and still rise to a high-ranking elected office. For him to be both, he would have to have worked out a plan more complicated and subtle than anything ever devised by Arvin Sloane on Alias, and Occam’s Razor made the success of that sort of plan seem unlikely outside of a fictional world.

Which was George Bush? Was he stupid? Or was he evil? For the first time in my life, I found myself interested in politics, because I had to know which category he fell into.

The more I read, the more I began to believe that he was neither. I began to see how an intelligent, imperfect (as all humans are) politician who had Christian beliefs could make the decisions that the President had made. There are a few things I would have done differently, but understanding that (whatever else he may be) George Bush is a politician made it possible to get a picture of why he made the decisions he made. I can’t find a single action by the President that doesn’t fit with this mold. Even the things that I disagree with the President on, I can usually see how it would be possible to justify the decision without bending my morals or the facts into unrecognizability.

I understand how it’s possible to believe that George Bush is misguided. I get that it’s possible for someone to be rational, good hearted, and utterly opposed to virtually everything the man has done. What I don’t get is how one can be rational, good hearted, and hold the belief that Bush is stupid or evil.

The problem I have is this. If one assumes that the President’s decisions are based purely out of stupidity or evil, his actions are inconsistent. The only way to truly make a Stupid-Evil-Bush fit into reality is that he must sometimes be stupid and sometimes be evil. He couldn’t always be both and make the decisions Bush has made.

* In retrospect, I’m not sure how much of this perceived whining was Al Gore, and how much was his supporters, both in my day-to-day life and in the media. I hate the Playstation because it’s been my experience that a lot of very loud, obnoxious idiots support the Sony system. Maybe I don’t dislike him, but rather find (found?) his most vocal supporters to be annoying.

If you’ve been playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, you probably know about some of the technical issues they’ve been facing. The server that I’m on isn’t one of the most heavily populated ones, so it’s not subjected to the worst of the issues, but I’ve noticed problems from time to time (problems most likely made worse by the fact that I’m on dialup, which causes problems less often than you’d think).

Penny Arcade e-mailed the developers a set of straightforward questions, and got some answers. It is, as Tycho points out, considerably more direct than most interviews, which is very refreshing.

Kudos to Blizzard, both for the responses, and for their ongoing efforts to fix the problem*.

* Note: Judging by their treatment of President Bush, if I were a liberal, this post would instead have been a rant about how Blizzard doesn’t really care about these issues, they’re just raking in our money and laughing at us. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, though, and think that they are, at heart, gamers who want to provide the best product possible. Many authors are noted as saying that they write the books that they’d like to read; I think Blizzard’s developers are trying to give us the game they want to play.

I wrote recently (on an e-mail discussion list) about the dangers of basing decisions on other court decisions rather than explicitly writing them on the constitution. I compared the practice to cutting a board then using that board to measure the next board to be cut, then using that board to cut the next one (and so on). Eventually, the last board in the sequence isn’t even close to the original template.

I found an old piece by Joe Roland, How stare decisis Subverts the Law, which makes the point better than I did.

It’s definitely worth the read.

Given my typical distaste for new people, it seems unusual that the thing that gives me the most pleasure on the internet is hearing from strangers. Sometimes, those strangers become fixtures in one’s life. They can move from being friendly acquaintances to true friends, and often, we never even see their faces.

I got an e-mail yesterday from a member of the Navy who said that he had served with Pablo Paredes. I’m not sure if the e-mail was a response to my post or to a comment that I’d left on someone else’s blog, but I really appreciated getting it… despite the fact that the e-mail’s author disagreed with me on several points.

I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of posting an e-mail message, but I did want to make a mention of the fact that the author wrote that he disagreed with the current war, but he was living up to the oath he’d made to the American people. Regular readers know that I’m very strongly in support of the war for various reasons, but I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate the man who wrote this letter, and his many brothers-at-arms who serve the United States loyally even if they don’t fully agree with the motivation behind their orders.

To the author of that e-mail, and all of those who, whether they agree with him or with me, serve so that I may sleep in peace at night:

Thank you. My thoughts and prayers are with you all.

—–

Meanwhile, I’m just over a week late in linking to this post at Varifrank: Welcome Neighbor!

The post examines motivation of the Iraq war on a micro scale, and (as always), it’s worth a read. Of particular note is the epilogue:

When the law begins to act as a shield for criminal activity, it is not a crime to use the law against itself. I do not care if we found a single WMD in Iraq. I would have called for the invasion of Iraq for no other reason than it has supported terrorists and has a long border with Iran and Syria. It was the Tikriti Clan in control of Iraq that was the danger, not what they had in the paint locker.

It is always a fetish for the left to concentrate on the weapon, rather than the criminal. Usually you see this portrayed in its obsession against private ownership of pistols but in this case its WMDs; but the situation is the same.

We’ve removed a criminal element from the neck of the people of Iraq, and it was our duty as fellow of the world citizens to do it. If you needed the threat of WMD to go and stop that nightmare, then it served its purpose. But it should have taken much less, and shame on you that it didn’t, and shame on us all for waiting so long to stop it, but there is no shame that we didn’t find the weapons.

Amen.