Newsweek reporter Rod Nordland came away awed by the Iraqi election, despite earlier misgivings. Read the whole thing.
The most touching story I heard was that of Samir Hassan, 32, who voted in a Sunni neighborhood of West Baghdad. Dressed in shabby clothes, he hobbled to the polling place on one leg and a pair of crutches; the other leg had been blown off by a suicide car bomb that targeted a police recruitment center he had the misfortune of passing at the time, one day last October. "I would have crawled here if I had to," he told a reporter who found him waiting in a long line. "I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me."Posted by Alan at February 1, 2005 05:38 PMIt was hard not to catch some of that spirit....
After the polls closed, back in the Green Zone the Independent Iraqi Elections Commission held a press conference in the Convention Center. There were no American officials there; even the United Nations advisers stayed in the background. IECI spokesman Fareed Ayar came to the podium and gave a look of exasperated exhaustion, and then broke into a broad smile. "This day was a historic day and a very Iraqi one," he said. "A day full of surprises." Elections officials were predicting that 8 million of the country's 14 million registered voters will have voted, though it will be some time before there's an official tally—and as long as 10 days before results are final and announced. "The streets of Baghdad were not filled with blood as the terrorist groups threatened," Ayar said. "The cities were not bathed in blood."
In the next days it will become clearer how well the Shia List did compared to Prime Minister Allawi's slate and some of the lesser contenders, but in this election, that doesn't seem to matter nearly as much as whether or not it happened. In a real sense, the much more important contest was between the terrorists' and the Baathists' ideal of an imposed state, and the ideal of democracy—and this time democracy won. "Today, Iraqis have shown both insurgents and the world that they are ready to join the international community of democratic nations," said a statement by the Iraqi Election Information Network, an independent monitoring group.
It was hardly a perfect election. In large parts of the country, Sunnis did not vote in very significant numbers, and they will almost certainly be greatly underrepresented in the National Assembly. When that Assembly begins drafting a new constitution for Iraq, it will have to find a way to encourage and enable Sunni participation—or risk deepening Sunni support for the insurgency, or even provoking a civil war. And there are very large questions about whether the Shia, so long disenfranchised by the minority Sunnis, will be willing to bring them into government to keep the peace. But for the moment, those seem like tomorrow's problems. I look down at my right forefinger, still purple from the voter's ink I dipped it in at the polling station, to the pleased amusement of the workers there. It's supposed to take three days to wear off, but at least I don't have to worry about being killed over it. When I think of all those Iraqis with their stains of honor, it's hard not to feel a sense of awe at the courage they showed today.