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COMMENTARY
So, who really did
win?
By Marc Erikson
The price of gold dropped US$2.5 an ounce
in Asia Monday morning. Oil futures prices were
off as well. The US dollar firmed against the yen
and the euro. Major stock markets were higher
across the board. Markets won't tell us who
exactly won the Iraq elections on Sunday, but they
did view the outcome as a vote for greater
stability and a loss for the insurgents who had
made it their aim to prevent voting on any
significant scale. As one not eligible to vote,
Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, credited with
orchestrating much of the insurgency in Iraq, put
it with admirable clarity, "We have declared a
bitter war against the principle of democracy and
all those who seek to enact it." Democracy, he
said, was a blasphemous invention of Greek
heathens.
Well, as it turned out, some 8
million (about 60%) out of the country's eligible
voters - defied the message, threats and
murderous-suicidal efforts of Zarqawi and his ilk
and cast their vote for a constitutional assembly.
It will not persuade those who had "forecast",
though in reality more likely hoped for, all sorts
of mayhem, that Iraq is on the road to greater
stability and civility. But, as the German
magazine Der Spiegel, no great friend of the US
president, put it, "Perhaps even one or another of
ardent Bush haters may now give up his cool
equidistance between the protagonists of terror
and the actors in the transformation process in
Iraq," adding that, "one must be grateful for
their [the Zarqawi followers'] open repudiation of
the individual's dignity and self-determination.
The cards are now clearly on the table."
One suspects that such hopes and
expectations may not come to pass.
Sixty
percent of courageous voters' participation
notwithstanding, it will be ever so easy to find
all sorts of things wrong with what happened on
Sunday and to come up with scenarios of what will
go wrong tomorrow and in the more distant future.
Those who bravely predicted that Sunday's
elections would turn into a victory for the
insurgents will not readily retract, but rather
attempt to prove their point. And, of course, the
body count will go on.
And yet, much is at
stake in the further course of this year as Iraqis
attempt to reconstruct civil society and give it
the shape of a functioning nation state. It may
have impressed even the cynics or pessimists for
the idle purpose of seeing their dire forecasts
come true that by going out to vote in large
numbers, a great majority of Iraqis said no to the
death cult of the Islamists and proclaimed their
right and intention to live a more normal life in
the future. The Islamists are a different breed
than the terrorists of the French Revolution. But
to many then, the Jacobin terror was no less
frightening than Zarqawi's or al-Qaeda's now. It
came to be defeated when some brave souls stood
up, laughed at it, called it ridiculous. Religious
fanaticism laced with a death wish is not as
readily defeated. But those who stood in line to
vote, whether in Baghdad or Basra, made a
statement for common sense.
This was round
one. We have a fair idea who lost it. We don't
have much of an idea at all of who won. To cast
the matter in terms of majority Shi'ites in
distant alliance with Kurds and against Sunnis is
a formula ready to hand, but most likely a
misleading one. Most Kurds, of course, are Sunnis
as well; but that's a minor point. As the Iraqi
constituent assembly begins its work, the key
issue that will likely determine Iraq's future and
stability as a nation is the extent to which
secular constitutional precepts are agreed on and
written into the governing basic law of the land
and the extent to which religious law, while a
guide, does not by itself become the state's basic
principle. In this regard, there are reasons for
optimism. Religious fundamentalism has not in the
past been a characteristic of Iraqis. With the
possible exception of radical cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr, none of the known Iraqi leaders espouse
it.
What appeared to unite those who voted
on Sunday was a strong desire to get on with life,
the notion that by the act of voting they took an
important step in that direction and away from the
Saddam Hussein era and the more recent past of
American occupation and insurgent violence. They
deserve full support for that and for becoming the
third nation in the Middle East to give democracy
a serious try.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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