An election that was not supposed to happen because terrorists and insurgents in Iraq, and their sympathizers in the West, did not want it has produced results that the doomsters that fought to prevent it did not expect.
First, the massive boycott of the polls, predicted by Saddam nostalgics and other members of the Hate-America coalition, did not take place. Last month almost two-thirds of Iraqi voters went to the polls in the first free election in their history.
Now, the final results, announced Sunday, show that the doomsters were wrong a second time.
Lots of things that the opponents of the liberation of Iraq had prayed for did not happen.
There was no green tidal wave of radical Shiism that was supposed to transform Iraq into a carbon copy of the Kohmeinist republic in Iran. The United Iraqi Alliance, a list endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of the Shiite clerics, did win 48 percent of the votes. But this is far short of the two-third majority that the Shiites could have won had they all voted for the list. In any case, the UIA list was not presented as a confessional ticket and included Arab Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians. It was an alliance of half a dozen parties and groups, including radical secularists.
The supposed total exclusion of the Arab Sunnis from the transitional National Assembly did not happen either. Arab Sunnis account for some 15 percent of the Iraqi population and are a majority in four out of 18 provinces. In three of those provinces the voter turnout was below 30 percent, and in one, Anbar, dropped to two percent. But only half of the Arab Sunnis live in those provinces. The other half, in Baghdad and other major cities, voted in larger numbers.
Based on their demographic strength, the Arab Sunnis should have 42 seats in the 275-seat transitional National Assembly. The final results show that the new assembly will, in fact, include 49 Arab Sunnis. Of these 40 were elected on the Shiite-led and the Kurdish lists plus the list headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, himself a Shiite. Five were elected on a list led by interim President Ghazi Al-Yawar, an Arab Sunni, while four more won within smaller alliances. If we add up the Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslims, at least 110 members of the newly elected assembly are Sunnis.
But the politics of new Iraq is not about sectarian differences.
Religious and ethnic identities were used in this election in the absence of political organizations that could not have taken shape under despotic regimes. The Shiite-led and Kurdish lists, the two main winners, could theoretically form a coalition to control the transition and the writing of a new constitution. But we are not dealing with monolithic groups here. The two lists are formed of alliances that represent many different ideologies. My guess is that the new assembly will be organized on the basis of political programs rather than sectarian and/or ethnic identities. Those who have known the new emerging Iraqi leadership for years know that almost all its members are united in their rejection of any new form of despotism. Having been liberated from Saddamism few Iraqis would want to return to a state of virtual servitude in the name of religion or ideology.
Saddam nostalgics, having failed in all their predictions of doom in Iraq, will now play another tune.
This will be based on the claim that Iraq after the election will either become an Iranian-style Islamic republic or will be plunged into civil war. Some despotic Arab regimes, already shaking in their pants for fear that democracy in Iraq may spread to their neck of the wood, have lost no time to play that tune.
The overwhelming majority of Iraqis, however, see the Khomeinist regime in Tehran not as a model but as a warning. The Iraqi electorate has rejected not only Khomeinism but all other brands of extremism. (The combined share of the votes for the most radical groups was less than one percent.)
Another argument used to undermine the importance of the Iraqi election is that it took place under foreign occupation. But let us not forget that all the crucial elections in the early stages of building democracy in postwar Germany and Japan were also held while Allied troops, led by the US, were present on German and Japanese soil. For much of the past half a century the Allies maintained almost a quarter of a million men on German soil.
In any case the fact that the Palestinian territories are under Israeli occupation has not been used by anyone to undermine the validity of the recent presidential election that led to a famous victory for Abu Mazen.
Anyone in his senses would admit that Israeli military presence in the Palestinian territories, a mere 5000 square kilometers, is far more consequential than that of 150,000 US-led troops in Iraq, a country 100 times larger than Gaza and the West Bank combined.
The Iraqi election was organized by the United Nations and ran by the Iraqis themselves. Most of the 18,000 villages and 290 towns and cities of Iraq have hardly saw any foreign troops if only because there are not enough such troops to cover the entire country.
The 8.7 million Iraqis who voted did not think that the presence of the US-led coalition would in any way undermine the legitimacy of their first democratic exercise in Iraq.
In the Palestinian election only 40 percent of the voters actually cast ballots while in Iraq the number was close to 60 percent.
The fact that voter turnout in four mainly Sunni provinces was low is no excuse for questioning the entire results. In the last presidential election in Algeria the two mainly Kabyle provinces staged a boycott, with voter turnout dropping below two percent in Tizi-Ouzou. But that did not prevent the international community recognizing that election as the cleanest held in Algeria so far. Thus the only reason that some people, including many in the West, are desperately trying to minimize the importance of the Iraqi election, the cleanest held anywhere in the Arab world so far, is their hatred of the US and/or George W. Bush.
One thing is sure: Iraq has been set on the road to democracy. This is going to be a bumpy road with many zigzags. But, provided the US-led coalition does not lose its nerve and stays committed until new Iraq can defend itself against domestic and foreign foes, the Iraqi experience could inspire democratic change in other countries in the region.
With the Iraqi election as a model, it would not be easy for Syria to orchestrate another fake election in Lebanon in May. The Khomeinists in Iran would find it hard to present another pre-arranged election in June as a genuine reflection of the popular will. The Egyptians would have a hard time producing another 99.99 percent majority in yet another single-candidate election next year. In Libya Col. Qaddafi might find it harder to appoint his son as prime minister with a mere acclamation from his henchmen.
The Arab despots and their friends in the West make a meal of the cliché that democracy cannot be imposed by force. But what happened in Iraq was not imposing democracy by force. The US-led alliance used force to remove impediments to democracy in Iraq. The people of Iraq became co-liberators of their country first by not opposing the US-led coalition and then by risking their lives to set their nation on a new path in the face of the most vicious terrorism ever seen in the region.
It is time to see what is happening in Iraq on its own merits and not in the context of an irrational hatred of the United States and/or George W. Bush. Like it or not Bush has got one thing right: Give any nation a chance to choose freedom and democracy and it will.
