Liberty Updates
Here's another surprisingly upbeat assessment from
the NY Times:
I write this from a rundown house in the poorest slum in the Middle East. Until yesterday, my hosts and neighbors had for three decades been among the most repressed people on earth. Yet when I walk out the door, I see a city smothered in posters and banners from a hundred political parties. Like Afghanistan last year, the country has endorsed the right to vote in percentages that shame the electoral apathy of the rich world. Let nobody tell you that this election was anything but real. Iraq's Baathists and Wahhabis may continue to bark, but this caravan is moving on.
Newsweek's correspondent
was nervous at first, but then relaxed.
The most touching story I heard was that of Samir Hassan, 32, who voted in a Sunni neighborhood of West Baghdad. Dressed in shabby clothes, he hobbled to the polling place on one leg and a pair of crutches; the other leg had been blown off by a suicide car bomb that targeted a police recruitment center he had the misfortune of passing at the time, one day last October. "I would have crawled here if I had to," he told a reporter who found him waiting in a long line. "I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me."
Fred Kaplan
warns that problems are still ahead, but expresses optimism that Iraq may indeed turn out to be the model:
Finally, imagine a Syrian watching Al-Arabiya, seeing Iraqi-born Syrians going to special polling places to elect Iraqi leaders, observing that no Syrians of any sort have the right to elect the leaders of Syria—and perhaps asking himself, "Why?" It is not inconceivable that this flicker of democratic practice in Iraq could ignite a flame of some sort across the Middle East. To what end, and for ultimate good or ill, who knows. But something happened in Iraq today, something not only dramatic and stirring but perhaps also very big.
