Bombs, bullets, ballots

By Tuesday, it will have happened twice in less than four months, though rarer than a solar eclipse, a shooting star or a volcano eruption. It should be celebrated as a magnificent, historic event, but no: Today’s Iraqi election, like the October election in Afghanistan signifying the birth of a new democracy and the first vote of a long-oppressed people is presented by the media as a danger to be avoided at all costs.

For months, the so-called mainstream media have struggled to depict the Iraqi elections as a fools’ errand foisted on the Iraqis by George Bush. When I was in London earlier this week, the BBC and many European newspapers predicted an “invalid outcome” because “the Sunni population is boycotting the vote.” On Tuesday, Senate opponents of the president’s Iraq policy lined up behind former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd and Teddy “the swimmer” Kennedy to pillory Condoleezza Rice —and declare Iraq to be “a quagmire … a total failure.”

But despite a pre-election poll of 33,000 Iraqis by the Arabic paper Asharq Al-Awsat, in which 72.4 percent said they intend to vote — including 33 percent in the heavily Sunni central provinces — the U.S. media continue denigrating the process.

“Is a 50 or 60 percent turnout enough?” reporters have skeptically asked the White House, State Department and every U.S. and Iraqi official they can find in Baghdad. But when 50 percent of American voters went to the polls in November, it was considered a “historic” turnout.

All this misses the point. Though the final tally won’t be known for days, today’s election is already a success — a “grand moment in Iraqi history,” as the president predicted in his Wednesday news conference.

It is a remarkable accomplishment because:

(1) The terrorists tried so hard to stop it and failed.

(2) More than 17,000 candidates were willing to put their lives on the line, vying for 270 seats in the first freely elected National Assembly in the long history of Mesopotamia.

(2) Finally so many Iraqi women braved bombs, bullets, threats and intimidation to go to the polls.

Last October, whole Afghan families walked miles, skirting minefields and defying threats from Taliban thugs, just to vote. Little noted by my “media colleagues” with cameras at the ready to capture the carnage — was the amazing moment when Moqadasa Sidiqi, a 19-year-old woman, cast the first ballot in Afghanistan’s history. A woman cast the first ballot.

And though you wouldn’t know it from the media criticism and commentary, the feminine factor in the Iraqi elections is far more important than whether the voter is a Sunni or a Shi’ite.

By law, one-third of the new National Assembly members must be women. Women are about to transform Iraq, just as they are transforming Afghanistan.

Last summer, when I interviewed the elected governor of Iraq’s largest province, Al Anbar, in the heart of the Sunni triangle, he told me, “Women voting will change everything. No woman who carries a child for 9 months wants that child to grow up to be a suicide terrorist. They want the politicians to give their children something to live for, not die for — and we will have to do it.”

That judgment is echoed by most secular and religious leaders in Iraq. The National Assembly elected today will not only name a president, two deputy presidents, a prime minister and a Cabinet, it must also start drafting a new constitution due by Aug. 15. That constitution will then be submitted to a popular referendum — a second free election by mid-October.

This new Iraqi constitution will become the law of the land if affirmed by a majority of the voters nationwide. Approval of the constitution will yield yet a third free election on Dec. 15, 2005, to elect a new government.

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