Why the elections will happen

[gilliam]

Why the elections will happen.

From Iraq Elections Blog:

— Daniel @ 7:55 pm Baghdad time
With all the bickering about whether elections should or should not take place, it is instructive to look at how Iraq’s neighbors feel about it:

The Iraqi election later this month may be evoking skepticism in much of the world, but here in northeastern Syria, home to concentrations of several ethnic minorities, it is evoking a kind of earnest hope.

“Iraq is like the stone thrown into the pool,” Vahan Kirakos, a Syrian of Armenian ethnicity, said recently.

I wrote about this the other day but since then I have been following Stephen’s and emigre’s discussion and I think that it is still paramount to consider the stakes of this election.

If a relatively free and fair election take place at the end of the month, the ramifications for the Greater Middle East will be both far reaching and nearly impossible to predict. But that doesn’t mean that they should not go forward. One of the things that these elections are likely to accomplish is that the US will be able to gradually extricate itself in order to concentrate on the challenges ahead.

To think that the elections are merely a parochial exercise is either shortsighted or cynical to the point of ridicule. Those who wish for elections to be cancelled are still mired in the misconception - or willful slander - that postponing the elections would curb the violence. The forces wanting to derail the elections are those countries - most notably Syria and Iran but also Saudi Arabia - who see a freely elected government in Iraq as the single greatest existential threat to their collective existence.

The question at hand isn’t whether elections should go forward, but how will Iraq’s neighbors react once the elections have been held. And considering that these regimes are at work now backing the terror forces within Iraq, we should also be worrying about what the US reaction would be to likely attacks on a newly minted Iraqi government.

It is possible that once Iraqi self-rule has been more firmly established the US can then move against the foreign forces that have been making the run up to the elections so bloody. This is not within the perview of this blog, other than to illustrate why the election will go off as planned. They will because they must. At this point it’s not just about Iraq anymore. It is about the entire region and about the future for us all.

 

[gilliam]

ED MORRISSEY NOTES a Washington Post story saying that Iraqis are quite enthusiastic about the upcoming elections, and wonders why the Post buried it on page A12.Iraqis Get Enthusiastic For Elections
Over the past three months, all we’ve heard about elections in Iraq is a steady drumbeat of pessimism – that the violence of the so-called insurgency will keep Iraqis away from the polls, and even that the Iraqis don’t truly want democracy. Despite our men and women in Iraq telling everyone they can that this meme doesn’t apply in their experience, the mainstream media in America insists on reinforcing this dreadful analysis with every terrorist bombing, making the Islamist strategy pay off in spades.

Tomorrow’s Washington Post takes a surprising point of view instead:

The number of Iraqis making sure they are properly registered to vote has surged dramatically, officials said Saturday, calling the rise evidence of enthusiasm for the Jan. 30 elections despite continuing security concerns that have blocked the process in two provinces. After a slow start to the six-week registration process that began Nov. 1, the number of voters making corrections to official voter lists more than doubled in the final week, according to a final tally quoted by election officials Saturday.

Officials said that more than 2.1 million people went to local election offices to assure that eligible members of their households could vote. About 1.2 million forms were submitted to add names to the voter lists, an involved process that requires providing proof of identification and residence.

Iraqi voter rolls derive from food ration lists, so registration isn’t required. That piece of information from Karl Vick explains why the voter information centers didn’t get a lot of attention from ordinary Iraqis earlier on, a development that some media outlets apparently misinterpreted as a reluctance to register for the election. Having 2.1 million people out of 25 million take the time to confirm their status demonstrates a high degree of interest in the process and points to a rather large turnout.

The mainstream media intends on selling the Iraqis short, just as they did the Afghanis prior to their election. We heard nothing but how the clannish Afghanis would never embrace democracy, how the warlords would use violence to prevent the election, and how the Taliban remnants would overwhelm the voting centers with terrorist attacks everywhere except Kabul. It all turned out to be nothing but defeatist nonsense. Apparently, it looks like the same is true in Iraq.

One cheer for the Washington Post for finally reporting on the commitment of the Iraqis to govern themselves through democracy, even in the face of the Islamist lunatics. It would have been three cheers, except that they buried this story on page A12. At least they bothered to print it at all.