Questions for Readers

by Michael J. Totten
I have a cantankerous Wild West of a comments section. And that’s great. Today I’m going to put it to productive use for a change. Actually, I’m going to channel it somewhere else.
As most of you already know, Friends of Democracy and Spirit of America are filming a live Iraqi election coverage TV show on C-SPAN Sunday from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm Eastern Standard Time. (That’s 11:00 to 1:00 for you late-sleeping laggards on the West Coast.)
This will not be the C-SPAN you know and love (or loathe). It’s going to be pretty slick compared to that channel’s usual fare. It’s being professionally produced and shot in the National Geographic studio, which I can tell you is a very cool place. I spent most of Saturday there getting ready for this thing. Here’s a photo our tech guy Donovan took with his digital Nikon:

Part of what we want to do is solicit feedback from readers of the site. I am going to sift through that feedback and read some of it (live and on camera) to our guests and panelists. We have a pretty good lineup. It includes: Christopher Hitchens, author and journalist; Ahman Al Rikaby, former Director of Radio Free Iraq and current Director of Iraq’s Radio Dijla; Entifadh Qanbar, Special Envoy from the Iraqi National Alliance; Ghassan Atiyyah, Director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy; Hassan Mneimneh, Director of the Iraq Memory Foundation; and Jim Hake, Founder and CEO of Spirit of America.
If you have your own questions, please ask them and we’ll see if we can incorporate them into our programming. If you prefer to answer some of our questions instead, here is the place to start:

1. Was the Iraqi election successful?
2. Who are the terrorists and insurgents? What do you think they hope to accomplish through violence?
3. Do you think the American people have a good understanding of what is happening in Iraq? If yes, why? If not, why not?
4. People in America see that there is a great deal of violence in Iraq. Is there hope?

These aren’t essay questions, and you don’t have to answer all of them. A few sentences would be fine, although longer responses also are welcome. If you do ask or answer a question, be sure to tune in live on C-SPAN from 2:00 to 4:00 pm Eastern Standard Time and see if we use your material.
To make it easier for us on the show, please don’t respond in my comments section. Respond in the comments on the Friends of Democracy site instead. Here is the link to the post where the questions are asked. That’s where we need your comments. Not here. You can argue amongst yourselves all you want (as usual) here, but please don’t do it over there.
If you have a blog and you feel like throwing some of your reader feedback our way, please link to that post. Send your vast hordes. Give ’em the chance to have a little C-SPAN fame of their own.
Thanks so much in advance.