Voting is a privilege - even in Iraq

'Who the Devil Really Was'

Is this the European left's response to elections in Afghanistan?
If so, it had better brace itself for even worse news: elections in Iraq

By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

Mata Musing

It's been no secret that liberal Europeans, as well as America's left, do not wish for Iraqi success. To do so would prove them wrong about the Cowboy President's intervention.

For this reason, the success of the Afghanistan election was downplayed in the MSM in order not to fuel the notion that perhaps the world community was wrong, and Bush was indeed right. Ow... that would hurt.

Dec. 20 issue - I arrived in London the day after Hamid Karzai's inauguration as Afghanistan's newly elected president. Britain's most serious left-of-center newspaper, The Guardian, reported on the event in detail, noting that after decades of war, coups and bloodshed, this was a historic day. Its op-ed page had a somewhat different interpretation. It carried a huge, lurid cartoon of Dick Cheney, surrounded by Bush, Rumsfeld and Karzai, all looking drunk or mad or both, and singing, "Ashghanistan! Ashghanistan! From Sea to Shining Sea!!!" Is this the European left's response to elections in Afghanistan? If so, it had better brace itself for even worse news: elections in Iraq.

Yet flying high on the coat tails of the upcoming elections is the dogged determination that the election will be "illegitimate" in the eyes of the world because of the threat of boycott by the Sunni population.

Signs that the Iraqis, most likely including the Sunni tribes, are positive about the election comes from Mr. Beheader himself.

The best evidence for this comes from the audio tape released by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, one of the insurgent leaders, on Nov. 24, in which he laments that the clerics, leaders and people of Iraq abandoned him: "You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy ... You have quit supporting the mujahedin ... Instead of implementing God's orders you chose safety and preferred your money and your sons."

Iraq remains unstable and highly unsafe. But if al-Zarqawi is reading the public's mood right, the insurgency is losing popular support. It will try to disrupt the elections. The bigger problem remains Sunni participation. But assuming substantial Shia and Kurdish turnout, if 30 percent of the Sunnis vote—and that is quite possible—it's enough to give the new government some real national legitimacy. And that will make it easier to tackle the insurgency.

It's absurd to have to remind everyone familiar with the election process that voting is a privilege - no matter what country you are in. And those that choose not to vote... as half the population in America does at any given time... do not bring the election results into question.Instead they only thwart their own chances of having a say in what goes on.

Taking this one step further, when so many Americans choose to refrain from going to the polls, do we hear indignant outcries that our election results are "illegitimate"? Additionally, if an entire segment of the American population chooses to boycott an election, do we call that election illegitimate because of their boycott?

Of course not. Election fraud or questioning of the results involve only those who choose to exercise their right to vote... not those who do *not*.

And why should an election in Iraq be any different? The Iraqis, no doubt, realize that abstaining from voting seals their own fate of non-representation by not partaking in the process. Somehow I feel they may attach more importance to this vote than the complacent American voter.

So what's the purpose of muddying the waters of the election before they take place? Political agenda, as usual.

Note the sources. The "illegitimacy" cry is coming not only from the left, but from the terrorists themselves. Together, each for their own reasons, they are preparing the world for an argument on election results. Should the election take place, on time, and with the majority of Iraqi citizens participating regardless of tribe affiliation, both the terrorists and the left must have something to fall back on in order to claim failure.

As the above article proclaims in it's title, liberal Euros and America's left find it impossible to distinguish between the true evil of a dictator like Saddam, and the Cowboy President who opted not to take the chance that Saddam wasn't lying thru his teeth.

The current issue of Foreign Affairs has an exchange between two scholars, Tony Smith and Larry Diamond. Smith accuses Diamond, a longtime supporter of human rights, of making a "pact with the devil" by working (briefly) for the United States in postwar Iraq. Diamond, who had opposed the war, responds: "I do not regard the post-war endeavor as a pact with the devil. Let Smith and other critics visit Iraq and talk to Iraqis who are organizing for democracy, development, and human rights. Let them talk to the families that lived under constant, humiliating, Baathist rule. Let them see some of the roughly 300 mass graves of opponents of the regime who were brutally slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands. Then they will find out who the devil really was." I can't say it better.

Personally, I'm of the belief that if this election takes place on time, that is already one "success" chalked up for the good guys. To delay the election is what the terrorists want... a measure of their success in thwarting democracy in Iraq even by days.

And if the majority of Iraqis - despite their tribe affiliation - take part in this election, that is a second resounding success. And one even America can't claim as the norm.

Illegitimacy? I don't see how it's possible.