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The unsecret order of the blue finger
...Could there be a more revealing sentence? By conflating the Iraq election with the outcome of the Australian and US elections, he manages very neatly to give the whole game away.

The mock outrage that shot forth from the pro-war section of the blogosphere had nothing to do with any concern about the elections in Iraq, nothing to do with "solidarity" with Iraqis who voted, and everything to do with claiming political advantage at home. In this game, the Iraq election and the Iraqi people who risked their lives (and lost their lives) to participate in it are nothing more than tools in the backpacks of sad cases who want to gloat about the victories of Mr Bush and Mr Howard.

To claim the Iraq election as a victory for their side--all evidence to the contrary--and use it as some sort of device with which to bash their ideological enemies is typical of the sort of up-is-down world these guys live in.

But we only need to go back through recent history to know that the Iraqi people are the least concern of the Fighting 101st Keyboarders. For such people, the invasion in Iraq has never been about Iraq. It has been part of campaign to shore up support at home, a way of presenting "their guy" as tough and decisive and to paint their opponents as traitors.

As comments like the one quoted above reveal, the Iraq election--now that it is has happened--continues to be nothing more than a means to an ends.

So, oh you brave members of the unsecret order of the blue finger, here's a few points to keep in mind when the other kids refuse to play imaginary games with you and give you the credit you think you so richly deserve.

You gave up any right to claim solidarity with the Iraqi people when you excused at every opportunity their abuse and torture in the prisons of Abu Ghraib. When that story broke, it wasn't the side of the Iraqi's you took, it was the side of the Bush administration, and you mouthed all their pathetic rationalisations from "a few bad apples" to "not as bad as Saddam." When the Iraqi people demanded action, you joined the likes of Alberto Gonzales and argued that the international sanctions against such treatment didn't apply to the Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, that such measures were quaint and obsolete.

You gave up any right to claim solidarity with the Iraqi people when you refused to acknowledge how many people had been killed in this little adventure by attacking every legitimate attempt to put a number on the deaths. It wasn't the methodology of a survey like the Lancet study that caused you concern; it was the very existence of such a study that caused you all to freak out. So you sought to smear and downplay the result instead of trying to understand it or perhaps even insist that the administration make an effort itself to count the casualties.

In other words, your concern then, like now, was domestic politics not Iraqi lives. All you had was denigration for anything that didn't comply with your fantasy picture of post-invasion Iraq.

You gave up any right to claim solidarity with the Iraqi people when you joined those like Donald Rumsfeld who denied the very existence an insurgency, when you mocked people for being concerned about the post-invasion looting, and when you insisted that all this fighting stuff and other bad news coming out of Iraq was just a ploy by the liberal media to mislead the world.

Again, you had a choice between the reality in Iraq that ordinary Iraqis were facing or the spin the administration applied to that reality and at every turn you chose the spin.

And what about your so-called concern about democratic government and the rule of law that allows you to claim the election as a personal victory? Well, you've shown your true colours on that score too.

You gave up any right to gloat about democracy when you refused to hold the administration accountable for the bogus rationale it used to launch the invasion in the first place. You showed your true colours when for month after month you kept up the pretence that WMD were bound to be found any day now. You showed your true colours when you repeated every lie and exaggeration the administration made in trying to connect Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden and/or the attacks of 9/11.

Having failed every test of democratic citizenship at home you now claim to be champions of democracy abroad. It is to laugh....