Guest blogging at Atrios, Attaturk has much deserved fun with George Bush's latest addition to his long pile of bizarre statements:
Today at a press conference, President Bush dismissed these concerns out of hand. Bush said, "You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box."
Aside from this being a complete non-sequitur, perhaps Mr. Bush should talk to Cheney. For we know that the latter has watched "Ken Burns' 'The Civil War'" enough to realize that secession in the good ol' U.S. of A started in the wake of Mr. Lincoln being elected at the ballot box.
One can add to the observation. The Irish Civil War started after a trip to the ballot box:
... the pro and anti treaty factions, who went into the Irish general election on June 18th, 1922 as hostile parties, both calling themselves Sinn Féin. The Pro Treaty Sinn Féin party won the election with 239,193 votes to 133,864 for anti-Treaty Sinn Féin. A further 247,226 people voted for other parties, all of whom supported the Treaty. The election showed that the Irish electorate supported the Treaty and the foundation of the Irish Free State but De Valera, his political followers and most of the IRA continued to oppose it. De Valera is quoted as saying, "the majority have no right to do wrong".
Meanwhile under the leadership of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, the pro-treaty Provisional Government set about establishing the Irish Free State, an organised national army to replace the IRA and a new police force. However, since it was envisaged that the new army would be built around the IRA, anti-treaty IRA units were allowed to take over British barracks and take their arms. In practice, this meant that by the summer of 1922, the Provisional government of the Free State controlled only Dublin and some other areas like Longford where the IRA units supported the Treaty.
Fighting would ultimately break out when the Provisional government tried to assert its authority over well armed and intransigent anti-treaty IRA units around the country -particularly a hardline group in Dublin.
It's an elementary point that George Bush doesn't seem to understand; elections express differences, they don't sublimate them.
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