Knowing that the world didn’t need my amateur commentary on the election in Iraq and that following the returns minute by minute would lead to sleep deprivation (by contemporary standards, I would be a torture victim!), I spent the weekend watching plays off-Broadway, with no greater access to the news than that provided by the streamers near Times Square. Thus I got the voting story all at once upon my return home, and quite a good story it was, too (better than the plays, though they weren’t a waste of time and money either).
The election held four great risks for the anti-terrorist cause:
The Iraqis might sullenly stay home from the polls, showing that they regarded themselves as a people under alien occupation, determined not to collaborate with their oppressors. That was the outcome predicted by the fevered fringe of anti-liberation zealots, as well as by the cynics who think that Arabs prefer tyrannical rule to democracy.
Despite their desire to vote, most of the electorate might have been frightened away from the polls by the prospect of violence, thus demonstrating that the terrorists hold a majority of the country in their psychological, if not physical, grasp. That scenario was, it appears, what most of the mainstream media anticipated, and most were candid enough to concede in their headlines and ledes that it had not come to pass.
The voters might turn out in force to vote in a religiously intolerant, anti-Western government patterned on the Iranian mullarchy. That danger had already receded before election day, when the major “religious” parties declared that they wouldn’t include clerics on their lists of candidates and rejected the notion of a setting up a theocracy.
All might go well on the ground, but the Western media might nonetheless find only bad news to report, à la the false but devastating coverage of the Tet Offensive in 1968, where Walter Cronkite and his echo chamber declared the war “unwinnable” immediately after a smashing victory that tore the heart out of the Viet Cong.
At the moment, it looks like not even the last (and most likely) of those fears came true. Certainly there could be no better proof than the turnout at the polls that al-Zarqawi’s “bitter war against democracy” is a pinprick assault, tragic for those whom the Islamofascists murder but too sporadic and ineffective to intimidate the great mass of the population. It is not too hard for a few hundred thugs, well-furnished with left-over weapons and cash from the Saddam Hussein era, to carry out random killings, particularly when the forces of law and order consist of inexperienced policemen backed up by soldiers who don’t speak the local language. That kind of thuggish “insurgency” cannot, however, win military victories. If it also cannot instill fear, its failure is irredeemable and its demise just a matter of time.
The great hope of the terrorists was always that America would lose either interest or nerve and pull out, effectively leaving the fate of Iraq to the neighboring dictatorships. In the aftermath of January 30th, there are signs, faint but visible, that a portion of anti-war opinion is beginning to look on the Iraqi campaign as an overall success and to prefer nurturing a nascent democracy to scoring points against President Bush. While the other portion will continue to cavil – its new shibboleth seems to be, “The patient got well, but the operation was a failure” – its plaints ring hollower and hollower. When John Kerry says on Meet the Press, “[W]hat the administration does in these next few days will decide the outcome in Iraq, and this is – not maybe – this is the last chance for the President to get it right”, what does he mean? He prefaced that remark by alluding to a speech that he made last April. It’s enlightening to note what he then said was essential (“Here is how we must proceed”) if we were “to build a stable Iraq”.
First and foremost, Senator Kerry wanted “to internationalize the transformation of Iraq, to get more foreign forces on the ground to share to risk and reduce the burden on our own forces. That is the only way to succeed in the mission [emphasis added] while ending the sense of an American occupation.” President Bush didn’t follow that advice (and the vision of “a political coalition of key countries, including the UK, France, Russia and China” was almost certainly unattainable), yet somehow Senator Kerry’s way didn’t turn out to be “the only way”.
Second, the Senator wanted a U.N. High Commissioner, “charged with overseeing elections, the drafting of a constitution and coordinating reconstruction”, to take over the leading role in Iraq from the United States. Somehow, again, the country staggered through without the guidance of such a luminary.
Finally, “We need a massive training effort to build Iraqi security forces that can actually provide security for the Iraqi people. We must accept that the effort to date has failed: it must be rethought and reformed.” And the Kerry version of rethinking and reforming began and ended, as one would have expected, at “partnership with other nations, not just on our own”. But we went ahead, pretty much “on our own”, and the Iraqi police, by all accounts, did a superlative job of keeping terrorists away from the polling places.
It isn’t clear whether Senator Kerry still believes that his prescription is the one and only tonic for Iraqi democracy. If he has a new plan, he didn’t disclose any particulars. What is clear is that defeatism in Iraq has lost its plausibility. If leading Democrats cling to it, they will exile themselves to the political fever swamps. That will be bad for democracy in America – de facto one party systems swiftly tend toward misrule – but good for the prospects of liberal (in the true sense of the word) reform in Baghdad and, indeed, throughout the Middle East.
BTW, on Meet the Press, Senator Kerry referred to his “very clear, four point plan for precisely how we could be successful”. The plan that he described in his speech had three points. I guess that it is fair to say that he had a “secret plan”, or a quarter of one anyway.