Kevin D. Korenthal, October 12, 2004

Afghanistan had an election this weekend! The results are not in and may even be disputed by (check this out) those that do appear NOT to have won, but no matter what the outcome, the people of Afghanistan voted in Democratic Elections for the first time EVER!

As The Associated Press reports, the protest against the election by most of the opposition candidates has, "Fizzled in the face of popular support for interim leader Hamid Karzai and international condemnation." The Taliban had been making threats of attacks against voters but turned out to be an almost complete no-show. So, not only was it possible to complete elections in a country that has never known them, but it was possible to do it with no related loss of life! The MESS MEDIA has all but FAILED to cover this miraculous story. This is a huge success for Freedom and it is a headline that has no one to read it. Do you know what the media was "excited" about tonight? They were all up in a tizzy because a media owner that does not sign onto the "BUSH MUST GO" slogan, pervasive in the MESS MEDIA, has decided to run a ½ hour program which is critical of John Kerry's anti-war activities following his service in Vietnam.

The real excitement should be focused on this story, though. Afghanistan is about to announce it's first ever nationally elected leader! This brings great hope to the prospects of Democracy elsewhere. Iraq is scheduled to hold it's Democratic election in January 2005. The chance for this to actually happen has just increased significantly. But where is the media to trumpet this exciting development (insert sound of crickets chirping)? They are nowhere to be found. What's even sicker is that leading up to the elections, those who didn't want it to happen thought it couldn't possibly happen. It did. But they will never admit that they were wrong. They will simply refuse to acknowledge this amazing achievement and hope that everyone forgets their incorrectly pessimistic forecast.

The reconstruction in Iraq has moved at a snail's pace as violence in that country has increased. The terrorists that seek to dislodge the Americans and the fledgling government there will stop at nothing to prevent the elections from taking place. As long as the world media continues to give all the press coverage to the bad inside Iraq (and in Afghanistan), the good is going to continue to take a backseat. As John Kerry continues to ridicule the efforts of our soldiers and the Iraqi leadership who are creating a new Democratic government, a nation of similar roots will have moved one step closer to peace and freedom for its people. This comparison is completely lost on those that rail against the Bush Administration for not being able to silence the opposition to freedom and Democracy faster.

It has been a common theme among Democrats that the War in Iraq took the administrations eye off the ball in Afghanistan, which they claim is where the real War on Terror is. The Afghan people may not have convinced anyone that making a Democratic nation from that which had never known Democracy will be easy, but at least they took some bite out of the charge that Afghanistan suffers because we went into Iraq.

America did not ask to fight a war against international terrorism. The ideology that breeds the very terror we fight was not born from the ashes of the World Trade Center and The Pentagon. It came from decades of allowing the violent radicals of the world to hide in the shadows and strike against us at will only to slither back into the shadows again. The only way to combat the ideology of hate that led to the September 11th attacks is to replace that hate with hope. This weekend the seeds of hope took root in Afghanistan. God willing, Iraq will follow suit in January.

Copyright © 2004 Kevin D. Korenthal