In case you missed it, there was just a huge election in Iraq. 61% turn out is a nearly impossible feat in the US, where the recent Illinois primary saw a whopping 72% of the electorate stay home. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Iraqi elections where more honest as well.
We now have a functioning democracy in the heart of the Middle East. This is a phenomenon that will slowly, but surely eat away at the regimes like Saudi Arabia (already moderating) and Iran (in the process of another ‘revolution’).
Bush was right.
RONALD REAGAN liked to say that there was no limit to what a man could accomplish if he didn’t mind who got the credit. The transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy will be recorded as a signal accomplishment of George W. Bush’s presidency, and he probably doesn’t mind in the least that the Obama administration would like to take the credit.
This week’s parliamentary elections in Iraq brought 12 million voters to the polls – a remarkable 62 percent turnout, notwithstanding a wave of Election Day bombings that killed 38 people.
“Iraqis are not afraid of bombs anymore,’’ a middle-aged voter named Maliq Bedawi told a New York Times reporter as they stood amid the rubble of a Baghdad apartment building destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. If anything, the jihadists’ violence only intensified the refusal of ordinary Iraqis to be intimidated. “Everyone went’’ to vote, Bedawi said. “Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket.’’