Sunday, January 30, 2005
The vote!
The reason Iraq is holding a vote today is because the religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani demanded it. I'm in no way belittling the elections, just pointing out that they are occurring on the timetable of a religious leader and his popular support.
Representative government is always good and never bad, but really, think about it: an overriding quality of the international extremist Islamisist movement is patience - they realize that they cannot overcome the West's violent influence in the region by brute force. I doubt that to them the vote is as much of a watershed event as it is being played up to be by the Bush administration and in the Western press. The extremists' propaganda, "Come meet the new boss, same as the old boss" will be no less effective than supporters of the election's cries of "Well, it was a vote!"
The extremists will continue to implement their strategy of trying to make the Western occupation unbearable. And frankly, I believe the extremists have the strategic upper hand. The occupation of Iraq is expensive and the deaths that occur on both sides are politically taxing for the occupiers. In the Islamic extremists corner are cheap car bombs and improvised explosive devices and they view deaths both sides incur as glorious.
The parties running for office in Iraq are for the largest part based on religion. If a similar election was occurring in the US, it would be Catholics vs right-wing extremists Protestants vs liberal protestants vs secularists. And most have armed factions. And if those who vote are of the same sentiment as those polled by Zogby over the last few weeks - and the elected government heeds the will of the people, among the first things on their slate of business will be asking the US to leave.
Add to that the oil-rich flashpoint Northern city of Kirkuk with mixed ethnicities/denominations, and you have a very delicate post-electoral situation ... in a country already at war. "There are tensions" is an understatement.
// posted by Erik @ 1/30/2005 03:04:00 AM
permalink
| email post: 
