Beyond tyranny's shadow
On the morning after Iraq's historic election, Al Ahram, the official daily of President Hosni Mubarak's regime in Cairo, led with its version of a big story: On the front page, there was Mubarak, attending an African summit in Nigeria. The pose was outwardly serene, that of the pharaoh himself, staring into the camera. There were banner headlines proclaiming that Egypt had offered serious proposals to the summit about development and the eradication of diseases and Afro-Chinese cooperation in the year 2009. But Egypt's cunning ruler and his sycophantic press knew that Arab authoritarianism had just been handed a staggering defeat in Iraq.
Grant President George W. Bush his gamble. He had insisted on staying with the schedule of these elections, even as Iraqi leaders quietly advocated a postponement. He had been derided by the "realists" when he said that he had "planted the flag of liberty" and that his foreign policy would make the spread of liberty its animating drive. To be sure, the president may have fallen back on the principle of liberty's promotion when the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had come up cold. This was an odd Wilsonianism proclaimed by a conservative American president, but Iraq offered the doctrine dramatic vindication. We now know the scenes--ordinary men and women, Kurdish mountaineers and Arabs from the marshes, traditional women in black and their hip daughters, old and young alike, taking to Iraq's roads and streets to cast their votes, displaying their ink-stained fingers in celebration of democracy's dignity. Yesterday it was Ukraine's Orange Revolution; now democracy's exhilaration has come to Iraq.
We understand too well that Iraqis will not know instant deliverance from their troubles. We know that the jihadists and the insurgents are not yet all hunted down. But the simple insight that Iraqis who had known tyranny's terrors were exactly the right people to grasp democracy's lifeline was sustained.
Cassandras. It was, of course, the American "regency" in Iraq that protected these courageous people and made the elections possible. It took faith in the power and the discipline of the soldiers of the American-led coalition for Iraqis to brave their way to the polling stations in Basra and Mosul and Kirkuk. From Kirkuk, there came a "warrior note" from Col. Lloyd "Milo" Miles addressed to his 2nd Brigade Combat Team, on the eve of these elections. This commander told his soldiers of a meeting he held with local leaders. One of these leaders had heard a rumor that the U.S.-led forces would be confined to their bases on the day of the elections and that security would be provided by Iraqi military and police units. The man was distraught and demoralized. "I beg of you, you must help us, do not let us walk alone on that day." We know that the Iraqis did not walk alone on that signal day in their country's history.
One plain, unsentimental truth of these elections is their importance in the court of American opinion. In the past few months, Americans had grown estranged from Iraq and its people. There had come disenchantment even to countless people who had supported the war to begin with. The images from Iraq were of a people in a state of constant agitation; there had not been enough gratitude in Iraq for America's sacrifices. The kind of sentiment expressed to Colonel Miles in Kirkuk was never voiced in public. Now, on a surprising day, Iraqis went out and did the most American of civic deeds: They cast their ballots; they shed their fears and their second-guessing of the American forces in their midst to claim their own history, to show the world that they are eager to move beyond tyranny's shadow.
In the year to come, Iraqis will learn democracy's virtues--and the limits it imposes on political passions. Some men and women, we can be sure, will assert that democracy was betrayed, that the ballot box did not fulfill their hopes. But there will be nothing exceptional or novel about these grumblings. In the best of outcomes, the tormented country will be shared, and a serious constitutional process will do what has never been done in modern Iraq's bloody history: reconcile the different communities of this country. The Cassandras warn that the Kurds want full independence, that the Shiites yearn for a theocracy like Iran's, and that the Sunni Arabs will never accept their loss of dominion. The Cassandras have Iraq's history on their side, and the terrible ways of an Arab political tradition steeped in authoritarianism and sectarian bigotry. But they may lose their bet--again. Iraq surprised them on January 30, and the new history may yet stick on that hard Mesopotamian land.
This story appears in the February 14, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.