Iraqi elections follow the country's scheduled June 30, 2004 administrative handover in Baghdad and October 9, 2004 presidential elections in Afghanistan as the third major socio-political milestone in the forward-reaching, American-led war on terror. Afghans voted while some regions of the country remained under threat from Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists, and Iraqis assumed power while a handful of provinces suffered daily terrorist acts of killing and intimidation: both actions were taken at the insistence of the Bush administration and against a hail of criticism, skepticism and blanket worry tailor-made for Afghanistan and Iraq each. To pessimists and opponents, confusion, internecine strife and terrorist mayhem were all one false step away. Ironically, they spoke of the interests of stability and progress, when in fact they would find it difficult to deny that postponement would have sown terrific doubt among millions of hopeful, peaceful people — even if it didn't strengthen the hand of terrorists whose goal it was to obstruct democratic progress in the first.
And what happened? Critics were ignored, and objectives succeeded beyond all expectations. Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer relinquished power to Iyad Allawi on June 28, two days ahead of schedule. Afghans conducted an orderly, highly attended election with less irregularities nationwide than in Democratic Philadelphia one month later.
Correspondingly, calls for handing Iraqi democrats a rain check not only come from typical quarters — such paragons of representative government as Lakhdar Brahimi and Vladimir Putin, and most of the political and intellectual left — but sound obligatory rather than ardent, more a gesture of dependable opposition than justified disagreement. Criticism sounds similar, only now more like the third cry of "Wolf!" than prescient warnings. Past experience is on the optimists' side.
Does non-participation, especially from Sunni Iraqis, by choice or under threat, pose a threat to legitimacy? Historical precedent of incomplete representation on a provincial level in, of all places, Civil War-era America, flattens that argument. Representation by ballot is done by invitation, and is an institution thoroughly capable of supporting spectators; Iraqis active in preparing for elections agree.
What about security? As Baghdad's leaders, the White House and military leaders continually remind us, fourteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces are relatively secure and have been ready for elections for months. The Anglo-American-Iraqi victory in Fallujah that the left has been desperately trying to tear up into political defeat has left us with enemies more farcical and self-destructive, no matter how individually lethal and fanatic. The parade of hostages has stopped — even if more innocents are abducted in the future the correlation is obvious, and made crystal clear by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's increasingly panicked dispatches to his faithfully psychotic. What attacks have succeeded to kill Iraqis, like today's stupifying murder in a vegetable market, only harden national resolve against Islamist invaders and Ba'athist troglodytes. Intellectual elites don't seem to understand a society that truly lives the anthem "Give me liberty or give me death": after forty-six years of modern military dictatorships and twenty-five years of Saddam Hussein's Stalinist horror, Iraqis aren't turning back. As Strategypage reports, insurgents are forced to recruit their suicidal murderers from the ranks of the brainwashed and the numb-skulled — and even then, some one-way bombers need to be suckered. Iraqi forces designed to meet and destroy a paramilitary enemy — not including the unfairly maligned Iraqi police forces — grow and strengthen. Perhaps the surest sign of enemy defeat is Iraq's construction and societal rebirth, slowed in many places over the past two years but halted in very few, and continuing unabated in others unaffected by terrorist destruction.
What's left? The only key to victory the free world's authoritarian enemies have been able to claim since the beginning of this war: our own doubt, insouciance the curse of the blessed. The president's simple determination and reelection because of it should guide us from there.
