The New York Times is not widely known as a cheerleader
for the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq. It’s unlikely to be
a whitewash when the paper reports, as it did this weekend, that the views
of tire repairman and Iraqi voter Salim Mohammed Ali are
representative: “Who do I blame [for shortages of electricity,
water, and gasoline]? The Iraqi government… I think the Americans
should stay here until our security forces are able to do the jobs
themselves. We Iraqis have our own government now, and we can
invite the Americans to stay.”
“The Iraqi focus on its own democracy, and the new view of the
United States, surfaced in dozens of interviews with Iraqis since
last Sunday’s election,” reports the Times, noting that
“by many accounts, the elections last week altered Iraqis’
relationship with the United States more than any single event
since the invasion.”
And why shouldn’t it? Ensuring that the elections went forward
represented a crucial act of good faith on the part of the U.S. As
Paul Mirengoff put it on Iraq’s election day:
The process by which we succeed in Iraq (if we do) can
be thought of as a series of events by which one party keeps faith
with the others. First, we kept faith with the people of Iraq by
remaining in force to rebuild the country after we toppled Saddam
and carried out our search for WMD. Then, the Shiite majority kept
faith by rejecting the radical elements when they rose up against
the occupation. We then kept faith with the Shiites by scheduling
elections and seeing them through as scheduled. And today, the
Iraqi people kept faith by turning out and voting.
Mirengoff went on to note that the next step in faith-keeping
would be for the Shiites to develop a constitution that respects
Sunni Arab interests. The Shiites seem to be doing even better than
that: Adel Abdel-Mehdi, the current finance minister and a leading
candidate to be the next prime minister — he’s a powerful figure
in the coalition, likely to dominate the National Assembly,
endorsed by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani — has said in an
interview that his faction is “really willing to offer the
maximum,” short of demanding a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal,
to Sunni Arab political groups, including bringing them into the
process of crafting the constitution. The political calculation is
simple: The constitution cannot be ratified if it is rejected by
two-thirds or more voters in three provinces, and Sunni Arab
leaders may thus be able to scuttle a constitution they don’t like.
Sistani, for his part, according to a profile in last Sunday’s
Los Angeles Times, has been spending a lot of time
studying constitutions, including the American, French, and German
constitutions and the unwritten constitution of Britain, in an
effort to get it right.
The terrorist insurgency has not gone away, but the fiction that
the insurgents represent Iraqis as a whole has been erased by the
success of the elections. Indeed, last week in the mixed Sunni and
Shiite town of al-Mudhariya, just south of Baghdad, terrorists came
to make good on pre-election threats that there would be blood if
the townspeople voted in the election, which they did. The
townspeople fought back, killing five terrorists, wounding another
eight, and burning the terrorists’ car. (Three non-terrorists were
wounded.)
One election does not a democracy make. But it has become ever
more clear in the past two weeks that the election in Iraq was a
real turning point, and that there is every reason for optimism
about the continuing process of democratization.
