More good news


From Baghdad radio no less
This gives me hope for the Iraqis. They are doing it more and more on their own.

It is a recent afternoon in Baghdad, and a Sunni and a Shi'ite sheik are chatting in the modest Baghdad studio of Radio Dijla.
    
Moufaq Al-Alani, the program's 63-year-old host, waits patiently for a caller to express his views on terrorism before politely suggesting that parents and teachers teach young people to respect all Iraqis.
    
Qasem Al-Joubari, the Sunni sheik, says imams should emphasize that killing civilians is never acceptable for a Muslim. His Shi'ite counterpart, Mahdi El-Mohamedoui, says violence reflects poorly on both Islam and Iraq in the eyes of the world.
    
An engineer, turning and sliding dials on a bulky soundboard, furiously spins his right hand behind a glass partition to signal a commercial break, and a young staffer hurries into the studio with glasses of sweet black tea.
    
This is talk radio in Iraq.

This is the important fight. It's democracy's bid for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. Everything else has been to get to this point.

The Iraqis are choosing to talk about their differences instead of fighting and killing each other. It's the dawn of the rule of law. They may not choose to be an "American" democracy or even to agree with the United States, but most Iraqis have realized that force is a last resort.

We're winning the important fight.

And because of that, we've just set up the biggest game of dominoes in human history. All it took was a President who was willing to play an inside straight.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - January 18, 2006 at 05:19 AM  Tag


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