THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA

An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VII, Issue # 29, February 3, 2005
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
Home Page   Main Menu   Recent Articles   Site Map   Website Index   Issues & Controversies
  Cyberland University   Political Science, Philosophy, & History: Lectures   U.S. Constitution
  American Constitutional Law   American Constitutional System   American Political System
  Conservatism, Liberalism, & Radicalism   How America Goes to War
  World War IV: Islamist Terror War Against the U.S.A. & the West

IRAQ HAS VOTED
By Michael Rubin

THE IRAQI ELECTIONS OF JANUARY 30, 2005 -- IRAQ'S IMPORTANT START ON IT'S JOURNEY ALONG THE ARDUOUS PATH TOWARD A STABLE CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SYSTEM & THE IMPACT THAT THIS JOURNEY IS HAVING ON IRAQI SOCIETY & POLITICS
FULL STORY:   Braving bullets and bombs, millions of Iraqis, on January 30, 2005, cast their ballots in Iraq's first free elections in half a century. First reports suggested turnout in excess of 70%. While the Independent Election Commission of Iraq will not announce the official results for another two weeks, the encouragingly high voter turnout undercuts the cynicism of a press corps that questioned the election's legitimacy before the first ballots were even cast. The Associated Press, for example, opined, "If the vast majority of the Sunnis shun the polls -- either out of fear or lack of confidence in the process -- it would undercut the new government's legitimacy." On ABC's "Nightline," Ted Koppel asked, "What constitutes a legitimate election? . . . 80%? 70%? 60% turnout?"

Such questions misunderstand both Iraq and the elections. The events on June 30 mark a historic transformation in Iraqi society. In 2000-2001, I lectured at three different Iraqi Kurdish universities. Without exception, my University of Baghdad-trained translators stumbled over words like "tolerance," "debate," and "compromise." Such concepts simply did not exist in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Nor was their introduction instantaneous upon Iraq's liberation. When Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, many Iraqis, intoxicated with a misconceived notion of liberty, took to the streets, looting public buildings. Muhammad Muhsin al-Zubaidi used his new freedom to proclaim himself mayor of Baghdad and tried to withdraw millions of dollars from Iraqi banks. On April 10, followers of firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr confronted and then hacked to death returning cleric Majid al-Khoie. While Iraqi newspapers blossomed, they often published slander rather than news. Iraqi journalists explained that democracy meant they print whatever they wanted.

Initially, Iraqis voiced maximalist demands. In May, 2003, Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Masud Barzani told an international property restitution fact-finding committee that even third-generation Arab residents should leave Kurdistan and never come back. Turkmen and Assyrian groups demanded their own federal states in northern Iraq. At the University of Basra, pro-Iranian gangs plastered professors' offices with pictures of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, and threatened anyone who dared take them down. In the Kadhimiya section of Baghdad, Islamists posted religious guards in front of secular schools, prohibiting unveiled girls from attending class. Watching American officials excavate mass graves of Saddam's victims near the ancient town of Babylon in May, 2003, Iraqis demanded summary execution for all two million Baath Party members.

But, as they grew accustomed to their new freedoms of speech, assembly and movement, Iraqis shed their isolation. In August, 2003, I drove from Baghdad to Duhok, a mountainous town in Iraqi Kurdistan with Ali, a Shia from Basra. He grew nervous as we approached the line which, since 1991, had divided Saddam's Iraq from the Kurdish safe-haven. Just four months earlier, visiting Kurdistan would be cause for interrogation, if not imprisonment and execution. More than two dozen abandoned Iraqi police checkpoints testified to the internal travel restrictions the previous regime had imposed upon ordinary Iraqis. A burned-out tank on the outskirts of Kirkuk, freshly painted with pink flowers, marked the location of an infamous checkpoint where police summarily executed Kurds. Ali worried about how the Kurds would treat him. As a conscript during the 1980s, he had served in the area with the Iraqi army. His anxiety was misplaced; two days later, he left Duhok with a trunk full of figs given to him by euphoric Kurds, eager to break free from years of isolation.

With travel restrictions lifted, Iraqis rediscovered their country. Arabs booked Kurdish hotels solid five months in advance. Kurdish colleagues from the University of Sulaymani visited college friends in Basra for the first time since the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Freedom to travel moderated religious extremism. "During Saddam's day, I didn't know much about Iran. I figured since it was a Shia government, it would be a utopia," a Shia schoolteacher told me in a Karbala coffee shop. "Now that I've been to Iran, I realize how wrong I was." Free to study the teachings of traditional scholars, populists like Moqtada al-Sadr hemorrhaged support. In the alleys and squares around Shia shrines in Kadhimiya, Karbala and Najaf, merchants began selling not only long-banned religious books, but Western magazines as well.

Despite doomsday predictions of civil war, Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen learned to compromise. In May, 2003, under the watchful eye of a colonel from the 173rd Airborne, Kurds displaced from the Kirkuk region negotiated with Arab farmers to divide the wheat harvest. Before re-flooding marshes drained by Saddam Hussein's government and given as agricultural land to Baathist loyalists, fishermen and farmers sat down in al-Amarah to discuss revenue sharing and compensation.

Democracy is a process, and Iraq has only started along its arduous path. But already, the transformation is vast. In January, 2004, in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriya, hundreds packed an auditorium for a town-hall meeting. For three hours, residents peppered their mayor and city councilmen with questions ranging from electricity rationing to property disputes to questions regarding licensing of a local radio station. The Iraqis raised their hands and made their statements with respect. They had learned the meaning of tolerance, debate, and compromise. In February, 2004, I witnessed a similar scene in the largely Sunni Arab city of Baquba. Across the Arab world, politicians lecture to the people. Only in Iraq is the opposite true.

Iraq's new reality is reflected in its politics. At a political rally earlier in January, a former exile who returned to Iraq last year began crying. "This is the first time I've heard politicians campaign in Arabic," he explained. This fact has not gone unnoticed in the greater Middle East. "It is outrageous and amazing that the first free and general elections in the history of the Arab nation are to take place in January: in Iraq, under the auspices of American occupation, and in Palestine, under the auspices of the Israeli occupation," Jordanian columnist Salameh Nematt wrote on November 25, 2004, in the pan-Arabic daily Al-Hayat. Baghdad is awash in campaign posters. Television and radio commercials vie for the electorate's attention.

Iraqis themselves will determine the legitimacy of their first elections. The views of Jordan-based United Nations and international election observers will be largely irrelevant. Judging an Iraqi election from Amman is the geographical and political equivalent of monitoring an American poll from Havana.

Some Iraqi politicians may also disparage the poll. Sunni elder statesmen Adnan Pachachi, for example, told BBC Radio, on January 8, that any Sunni boycott would render the elections "illegitimate." But a Sunni-Arab boycott no more invalidates an Iraqi election than an Afrikaaner boycott would in South Africa. Mr. Pachachi himself may be less motivated by a desire for inclusion than by a realization of his own political woes. A January 10-19 U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research poll found that Mr. Pachachi's Independent Democratic Gathering list polled an average of 1% across Iraq. In contrast, the United Iraqi Alliance endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, drew almost 40% of the vote. That losing politicians disparage an election's legitimacy is nothing new. It is politics.

That no political party is likely to win an absolute majority bolsters the election's legitimacy. While the Arab Middle East is dominated by single parties and strongmen, the transitional Iraqi government will be a coalition. Already, in smoky backrooms and parlors, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shia are meeting to strike deals and hammer out policy. Every Iraqi may not vote, but they now have a choice of candidates and parties denied to millions of Egyptians, Saudis and Syrians, let alone more than a billion Chinese. Iraqis may fear violence, but they no longer fear speech or thought.

On January 30, U.S. President George W. Bush spoke of the success of the Iraqi elections, saying: "Today the people of Iraq have spoken to the world, and the world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East." That voice of freedom may still be young but Iraqis, on January 30, determined that it cannot be silenced.


LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Middle East & the Problem of Iraq
   Page Two    Page One

The Problem of Rogue States:
Iraq as a Case History


Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and is Editor of the Middle East Quarterly.


The foregoing article by Michael Rubin was originally published in the Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2005, and can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum.


Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
January 31, 2005




Return to Top of Page

Go to the WEBSITE INDEX

Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Public Issues & Political Controversies


Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
Most Recent Articles


Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Volume VII, 2005


Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Subject Matter Highlights


Return to POLITICAL EDUCATION Homepage

CONTACT & ACCESS INFORMATION




LINKS TO PARTICULAR ISSUES & SUBJECT MATTER CATEGORIES
TREATED IN THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, U.S.A.:

Africa: Black Africa * Africa: North Africa * American Government 1
American Government 2 * American Government 3 * American Government 4
American Government 5 * American Politics * Anglosphere * Arabs
Arms Control & WMD * Aztlan Separatists * Big Government
Black Africa * Bureaucracy * Canada * China * Civil Liberties * Communism
Congress, U.S. * Conservative Groups * Conservative vs. Liberal
Constitutional Law * Counterterrorism * Criminal Justice * Disloyalty * Economy
Education * Elections, U.S. * Eminent Domain * Energy & Environment
English-Speaking World * Ethnicity & Race * Europe * Europe: Jews
Family Values * Far East * Fiscal Policy, U.S. * Foreign Aid, U.S. * France
Hispanic Separatism * Hispanic Treason * Human Health * Immigration
Infrastructure, U.S. * Intelligence, U.S. * Iran * Iraq * Islamic North Africa
Islamic Threat * Islamism * Israeli vs. Arabs * Jews & Anti-Semitism
Jihad & Jihadism * Jihad Manifesto I * Jihad Manifesto II * Judges, U.S. Federal
Judicial Appointments * Judiciary, American * Latin America * Latino Separatism
Latino Treason * Lebanon * Leftists/Liberals * Legal Issues
Local Government, U.S. * Marriage & Family * Media Political Bias
Middle East: Arabs * Middle East: Iran * Middle East: Iraq * Middle East: Israel
Middle East: Lebanon * Middle East: Syria * Middle East: Tunisia
Middle East: Turkey * Militant Islam * Military Defense * Military Justice
Military Weaponry * Modern Welfare State * Morality & Decency
National Identity * National Security * Natural Resources * News Media Bias
North Africa * Patriot Act, USA * Patriotism * Political Culture * Political Ideologies
Political Parties * Political Philosophy * Politics, American * Presidency, U.S.
Private Property * Property Rights * Public Assistance * Radical Islam
Religion & America * Rogue States & WMD * Russia * Science & Ethics
Sedition & Treason * Senate, U.S. * Social Welfare Policy * South Africa
State Government, U.S. * Subsaharan Africa * Subversion * Syria * Terrorism 1
Terrorism 2 * Treason & Sedition * Tunisia * Turkey * Ukraine
UnAmerican Activity * UN & Its Agencies * USA Patriot Act * U.S. Foreign Aid
U.S. Infrastructure * U.S. Intelligence * U.S. Senate * War & Peace
Welfare Policy * WMD & Arms Control


This is not a commercial website. The sole purpose of the website is to share with interested persons information regarding civics, civic and social education, political science, government, politics, law, constitutional law and history, public policy, and political philosophy and history, as well as current and recent political developments, public issues, and political controversies.



POLITICAL EDUCATION, CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS

POLITICS, SOCIETY, & THE SOVEREIGN STATE

Website of Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr.

Government, Politics, Public Policy, Legal Issues, Constitutional Law, Government & the Economy, Cultural Values, Foreign Affairs, International Relations, Military Defense & National Security, Geopolitics, Terrorism & Homeland Security, American National Interests, Political Systems & Processes, Political Institutions, Political Ideologies, & Political Philosophy

INDEX FOR THE ENTIRE WEBSITE

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z




THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA

An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis

Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor

Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic, Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues