Post-election roundup

Registering some progress:

While we won't know for a while who won Iraq's election, the vote itself succeeded. That should be cause for celebration, here and in Iraq.

Iraq has conducted three national elections in 11 months, with each one improving on the last. In January, with threats of bloodshed ringing in their ears, Iraqis voted for candidates who were too fearful to give their names. Sunnis mostly boycotted the vote, seeing it as an endorsement of the foreign invasion that removed them from power.

In October, when leaders of the temporary government asked Iraqis to accept or reject the constitution they'd written, Sunnis came along, but just barely. Turnout rose from January and violence declined.

And this time, leading Sunni clerics urged their followers to vote. Insurgent threats against voters died away and ballots were cast in large numbers even in insurgent hotbeds such as Ramadi. Nationally, turnout may have been as high as 70 percent - a figure that would be impressive in the United States.

Through gritted teeth:

Opponents of the war in Iraq may be irritated at the triumphal notes emanating from Washington and London after Thursday's peaceful election. George Bush - who mentioned the word "victory" no less than 15 times in a recent speech - called the event "historic". Tony Blair went for "extraordinary and inspiring". The adjectives are not incorrect.

Not incorrect. Naturally, however, amongst the many qualifications that follow there's one to the effect that if there were to be a good outcome not much credit would be due to those who cleared the way for it by removing the Baathist regime. Funny how the discredit for everything that has gone wrong does seem to be wholly theirs. It's called making a balance sheet, you know.

A different angle:

George W. Bush gets a lot of things wrong, but he knows that he's fighting the assassins… I'm glad that he is such a stubborn man.
.....
Amid the Bush administration's mistakes and lies about Iraq over the past three years, it's easy to lose sight of what is at stake in this battle. But this week brings it back to square one: It's about breaking the power of the assassins.

The Baath Party in Iraq ruled by its sheer brutality. I gathered reports from Iraqi dissidents and human rights workers in the early 1990s, when I was researching my novel about Iraq, "The Bank of Fear." These stories are sickening to recount, even now: The children of Shiite rebels in southern Iraq, dropped from helicopters to terrify the parents; dissidents who had nails driven into their heads; and prisoners beaten with metal cables until they collapsed or died. At Saddam Hussein's trial last week, a woman was speaking about how she had been beaten with those cables. Watching his arrogant scorn for the testimony of his victims, I remembered what the war is about.

Some of the aforesaid 'opponents of the war in Iraq' are less clear about this.

And here's an item on the expatriate Iraqi vote.