In Baghdad and elsewhere, streets are festooned with colorful election banners, and candidates — many of them first-timers — have taken advantage of better security to hold public meetings where voters pose questions on such nuts-and-bolts issues as housing shortages and rising prices. ...
More than 14,400 candidates, about 3,900 of them women, are competing for 444 seats on ruling councils in 14 of the country's 18 provinces. So it could take weeks of dealmaking to determine which parties have gained control of key areas such as Baghdad, the oil-rich Shiite-dominated south and former insurgent strongholds of western Anbar province.
How ordinary is this? From our point of view, of course. From the point of view of the Arab and Moslem worlds that Iraq is a part of, this is highly unusual.
Just flipping Iraq from an enemy country to a friendly country under a benign dictator instead of a brutal thug would have been a victory. How much greater is this?
And if the Iraqis pull this off, the example may be highly destabilizing to other despots in the Arab Moslem world and undermine the appeal of jihadis who promise to get rid of the despots.
