Not to curdle the Christmas pudding or anything, but it's hard to see how Uncle Sam comes out a winner in any of the elections that have just taken place, however historically, in the Arab world. This isn't to contradict President Bush, who said, referring to Iraq's parliamentary elections, we're seeing "something new: constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East." Sure, campaign posters and ballot boxes are new. But the emerging nature of this constitutional democracy -- from Iraq to Egypt to the Palestinian Authority (PA) -- calls into question whether, as the president also said in referring to Iraq, "America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror." For that statement to be true, Arab voters would need to be electing brave anti-jihadists, right? They would be dunking their fingers in purple ink for reform-minded advocates of equality and freedom of conscience, not to mention peace with Israel. But with nearly two-thirds of the ballots counted in Iraq, the initial headlines tell a different story. "Parties Linked to Tehran Gain in Iraq," reported The New York Sun. "Secular candidates not doing well," reported the Los Angeles Times. Apparently, that's putting it mildly. So far, election returns indicate that the Shi'ite Muslim religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), has overcome internal tensions and weak projections to win a dominating bloc of parliamentary seats.
That means that the democratic enterprise in Iraq appears to have empowered proponents of sharia law with alarmingly close ties to the terror masters of Iran. Little wonder, then, that something approaching jubilation is the reaction in Tehran. "We share this victory with the Iraqi nation because we paid a price for its preparation," said Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran, making reference to the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Usually described as Iran's "pragmatic conservative" in the Western media (not necessarily saying much), Mr. Rafsanjani continued: "It is a victory because the results were the opposite of what the Americans were seeking." If out of democratic Iraq emerges a sharia state allied with Iran, Mr. Rafsanjani would be right. Which would make President Bush wrong -- not about the need to fight in Iraq, but about the transformative powers of the democratic process (emphasis on process). In other words, what we see in Iraq and in the rest of the Muslim world is that the political freedom to vote doesn't guarantee election results that we in the West would in any way equate with political freedom. Amid claims of Shi'ite election fraud, one liberal party candidate, Mithal al-Alusi, told The New York Sun: "We may have just traded the Ba'athist fascists for the religious fascists." Continued... |