As per usual, I don’t know enough to hold the opinions I do.
I was going to write something almost unabashedly positive. Then I read
I think it’s great that they got the voting going on, and such high levels of participation (usually a sign of dissatisfaction, maybe here a result of novelty as well), but I think that’s the lesser virtue. Particularly if it turns into a tyrrany of the majority. And I fear that it could end up leading to civil war for them. I hope that a restrained benevolence informs the new Iraqi government. And perhaps it will.
Whatever happens, due to the status of forces agreement the US pressed on the interim government and likely will foist ion this one, only the US has jurisdiction over it’s own soldiers. Given how light the sentences given to the Abu Ghraib soldiers (especially compared to something similar in civilian courts), the Iraqi governemnt will be hamstrung by opposing forces, the US protecting the infan government and the people demanding justice and retribution.
the way the elections turned out was a damn good thing. i hate to say it, but this is now the third election that has gone well overseas when “the crazies” (a technical term) had said that the streets would be filled with blood on election day. the people of iraq stood up to the kind of tyranny offered by religious fanaticism by simply voting*. “the crazies” would have had them stay home or drive a car bomb to a polling place. while there was a little of that going on, there was not anywhere near as much as us liberals expected to happen (maybe even hoped would happen because it would have made the bush administration look bad?). now that things went fairly well, we’re just looking for other reasons to say things went poorly or that the election may not be the good thing we think it is. shame on us. this was a victory for the iraqi people and we have no business denigrating it because we hate bush and/or his administration.
*as a side bar: iraq was a pretty secular state before we ousted saddam and i don’t think it will go back any time soon. history doesn’t have many examples of countries moving in, what i would call, an ass-backward direction, although they do exist. iran is a good example. hopefully iraq has learned from watching iran that iran’s direction is not one they want to go. i’ll cross my fingers.