The Iraq vote looks awfully good
Monday, October 17, 2005 at 10:40AM ■"Sunnis' Turnout Points to Role In Iraqi Politics: After Constitutional Poll, Minority Group Targets National Assembly Vote," by Farnaz Fassihi, Philip Shiskin and Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 17 October 2005, p. A1.
As always, whenever the Bush administration helps to pull off an election in Iraq, you have to hand it to them. Poor job on occupation, no doubt, but this thing keeps muddling through. Of the Sunni provinces, only two are expected to reject the constitution. Remembering back to our own constitution coming online once three-quarters of the states ratified (Rhode Island, I will remind, was the very LAST!; we called the holdouts "Tories" back then, or just plain criminals, which shows you how much things change!).
Meanwhile, a lot of Sunnis are shifting from fighting the system altogether to working within the political process. This is crucial.
As I say in Blueprint for Action, Rome wasn't built in a day, and not as a democracy either. Iraq is doing just fine given all poorly planned occupation (F to the neocons, C+ to the officers doing their best in a crappy situation on the ground).
You will have pinheads of all political stripes intoning ominously that "democracy will not be the solution to the insurgency" as if that's news to anyone. No, democracy alone doesn't get you security, a robust internal security system gets you that. We forget how pervasive ours is, because it's so transparent, but building that takes a lot of time. It's the ultimate in System Administration, and there our forces still get a C+, but an A for effort.
Now the trick is to get the Sunni population to start policing its own a whole lot better, or at least not supporting them or tolerating them, and increasingly turning the bad guys in. Kurds and Shiites enforcing this narrowing outcome on the Sunnis as a whole looks a whole lot less necessary after this election, and that's potentially (there's always room for backtracking) a VERY good thing.
Remember, eventually the Serbians policed up their own and turned over the Milosevic clan. This is the next milestone we seek.
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