I asked how he viewed these elections in light of his personal calamities. “The rest of the Middle East is in a stage of political infancy, adolescence at best,” he answered. “Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, even Lebanon, they are all juvenile. But we are passing this stage of a politics about ‘who you are.’ This election in Iraq is about the politics of ‘what you want.’ And we want an end to sectarianism.”
I continued my tour of a city that seemed to be enjoying its election holiday. A Christian car-parts dealer outside the Syrian Catholic church in Karada, which is largely upper middle class, told me he would be voting for whoever would end the religious violence. (The deaths of nearly 40 people on Sunday attest to how difficult that task remains.) Nearby, the manager of Baghdad Polling Station No. 7 said voting was normal for Iraqis now — “This is our fifth time in five years,” he pointed out — and he would be voting for security, jobs and public works, not religion.
Marwa, a 24-year-old accounting student whom I spoke to on Sunday as she voted with her mother, noted that this was her fourth time going to the polls, and that while it was no longer exciting it was certainly her duty to her country.
At the Karkh Hospital I met Jassim, a 39-year-old Army sergeant whose lower leg had been blown off the day before (soldiers voted on Friday so they could provide security over the weekend). Recuperating in his bed, he showed me a purple-stained forefinger and said Iraq needed a leader to serve “the whole nation.”
Most Iraqi politicians have caught the anti-sectarian mood. That is why Prime Minister Maliki, a Shiite, had the confidence to break with the big coalition of his co-religionists that dominated in 2005 and run alongside several major Sunni tribal leaders. It is why once virulent Shiites like Fattah, the former Sadrist, now see Mr. Allawi’s party as a good bet. It is why the Iraqi National Alliance includes not only Salaam Smeasim, a pro-American Shiite in a veil, but also Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, a Sunni cousin of Iraq’s last king and the chief claimant to the long-vacant throne.
This is good. And it highlights the good effects of inculcating a habit of voting. The fifth major vote and it is no longer exciting. It is just duty.
More important than being no longer exciting is that after a fifth vote, Iraqis are gaining confidence that future elections will happen. That is a key development.
When you don't know if the current vote will be your last, you may be tempted (rightly) to vote for your own clan, tribe, or sect in order to make sure your group comes out on top when the musical chairs of voting stops and the ones left standing have no place at the table for dividing the spoils of victory amongst the victors. Voting in post-dictatorship countries could too easliy be seen as merely another way to steal--but without messy gunfire--until you are sure that more votes will take place that allow you to reverse your losses.
Iraqis are coming to see their votes as just one more in a line of voting. So they can afford to think of broader national issues and not just narrow concerns of tribe and sect.
Our presence in Iraq must continue for decades to make sure that the certainty of future votes is entrenched and more solid than mere hope.
UPDATE: Austin Bay lauds the vote and has hope for the future of Iraq. And yes, the ability of the so-called liberal part of our citizenry placed Arabs in the category of "not able to appreciate let alone carry out democracy" has been proven wrong so far:
It is regrettable that so many privileged citizens in free societies dismissed and denigrated those groundbreaking elections. The 2010 elections provide an appropriate time for the cultural and ethnic snobs (and snob is a kind word) who declared that democratic politics were beyond Iraqi capabilities to issue a series of abject, groveling apologies. The most reprehensible faction in this defeatist crowd is the ignorant clot of hard-left propagandists and faculty-club chumps who swore the Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein's vicious tyranny. The election serves as a teaching moment for these purveyors of fascism and inhumanity.
I admit that a number of isolationist-leaning conservatives similarly argued that Iraqis--and Arabs generally--are incapable of operating within a democracy and "need" a brutal strongman like Saddam to keep them in line. But as with many things, the media only reflected and amplified the leftist ideas which the media agreed with.
Iraq has a long road ahead (and so will need our help for years or decades to come, in some form), but so far so good. It took a long time for Germans, Italian, and Japanese to achieve democracy. Iraq can, too. And as I've written numerous times, if democracy is so unimportant to Arabs, why do Arab despots bother to carry out even fraudulant elections?
UPDATE: And here's a libertarian screed with lots of loopiness. What is it with some libertarians who believe we should never do anything, anywhere, anytime, about anything, and believe the unseen hand of something will automatically make things work out for us?
Honestly, they're as loony as the Lefties. Remember, the bad things in Iraq did not happen because we liberated Iraqis from Saddam's reign of terror. Bad things happened because Iran and Syria aided Sunni Arab terrorists and pro-Iranian Shia death squads, funneled in foreign terrorists for suicide bombings, and provided refuge for Baathists with lots of looted money and a will to kill in order to return to power.
I never ruled out that the new Iraqi government would have to defeat an insurgency. But i assumed that any reistance would not have the numbers of assets to win. What I didn't anticipate was that Iran and Syria would be so bold about aiding terror and that we'd let them get away with it. And I didn't see the problem of massive arms already inside Iraq that the terrorists and insurgents could tap to wage war, meaning they didn't have to smuggle weapons into Iraq to fight and kill. We won anyway--but at a higher price--but we did indeed win this war. Is this so hard to grasp?
The successful elections are another win that could make this a strategic win for us if democracy becomes an appealing and realistic alternative for Middle East countries rather than just a tactical win of flipping Iraq from enemy to friend.
