<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB110713937114640789,00.html>
The Wall Street Journal
January 31, 2005
COMMENTARY
Iraq Has Voted
By MICHAEL RUBIN
January 31, 2005; Page A18
Braving bullets and bombs, millions of Iraqis cast their ballots yesterday
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. Yesterday's
events 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 this month, 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
Nov. 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 Jan. 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 Jan. 10-19
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.
Yesterday, President Bush spoke of the success of the 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 yesterday determined that it
cannot be silenced.
Mr. Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor
of the Middle East Quarterly.
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experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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