'Realists' have it wrong

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In Europe, the wise old foreign-policy "realists" scoff at the Iraq elections -- Islam and democracy are completely incompatible, old boy; everybody knows that, except these naive blundering Yanks who just don't have our experience.

If that's true, it's a problem not for Iraq but, given current demographic trends, for France and Belgium and the Netherlands a year or two down the line.

But it happens to be untrue. The Afghan election worked so well that, there being insufficient bad news out of it, the Western media's doom-mongers pretended it never happened. They'll have a harder job doing that with Iraq, so instead they'll have to play up every roadside bomb and every dead poll worker. But it won't alter the basic reality: that the election may be imperfect but more than good enough.

OK, that's a bit vague compared with my usual psephological predictions. So how about this: Turnout in the Kurdish north and Shi'ite south probably was higher than in the last U.S., British or Canadian elections. Legitimate enough for ya?

But look beyond the numbers: When you consider the behavior of the Shi'ite and Kurdish parties, they've been remarkably shrewd, restrained and responsible. They don't want to blow their big rendezvous with history and rejoin the rest of the Middle East in the fetid swamp of stable despotism.

Naysayers in the Democratic Party and the U.S. media are so obsessed with Donald Rumsfeld getting this wrong and Condoleezza Rice getting that wrong and President Bush getting everything wrong that they've failed to notice just how surefooted both the Kurds and Shi'ites have been -- which in the end is far more important.

The Shi'ites, for example, have adopted a moderate secular pitch entirely different from their co-religionist mullahs over the border. In fact, as partisan pols go, they sound a lot less loopy than, say, Barbara Boxer.

Even on the Sunni side of the street, there are signs the smarter fellows understand their plans to destroy the election have flopped and it's time to cut themselves into the picture. The International Monetary Fund noted in November that the Iraqi economy is already outperforming all its Arab neighbors.

You might not have gained that impression from watching CNN or reading the Los Angeles Times. The Western press are all holed up in the same part of Baghdad, and the insurgents very conveniently set off bombs visible from the hotel windows in perfect synchronization with the U.S. TV news cycle.

But, if the reporters could look beyond the plumes of smoke, they would see Iraq is going to be better than OK. It will be the region's economic powerhouse. And the various small nods toward democracy in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere suggest the Arab world has figured out what the foreign policy "realists" haven't -- that the trend is in the Bush direction.