From The New York Times
Dated Thursday February 3
A Day to Remember
By Thomas Friedman
As someone who believed, hoped, worried, prayed, worried, hoped and prayed some more that Iraqis could one day pull off the election they did, I am unreservedly happy about the outcome - and you should be, too.
Why? Because what threatens America most from the Middle East are the pathologies of a region where there is too little freedom and too many young people who aren't able to achieve their full potential. The only way to cure these pathologies is with a war of ideas within the Arab-Muslim world so those with bad ideas can be defeated by those with progressive ones.
We can't fight that war. Only the Arab progressives can - only they can tell the suicide bombers that what they are doing is shameful to Islam and to Arabs. But we can collaborate with them to create a space in the heart of their world where decent people have a chance to fight this war - and that is what American and British soldiers have been doing in Iraq.
President Bush's basic gut instinct about the need to do this is exactly right. His thinking that this could be done on the cheap, though, with little postwar planning, was exactly wrong. Partly as a result, this great moment has already cost America over $100 billion and 10,000 killed and wounded.
Read more.
I've done my share of raking Friedman over the coals on these forums in the last couple of years. His pieces leading up to the invasion were, I thought, deluded with the idea the Mr. Bush and his neoconservative aides were motivated by noble ideals of spreading freedom and democracy to Iraq, when, in fact, they are just a bunch of colonial pirates.
In an election where so many people were threatened by nihilists with death for voting, it is heartening to see so many went to the polls. Calling Zarqawi "Charles Manson with a turban" is only a slight exaggeration. That does not excuse the shortcomings of an election being held under a foreign occupation, under conditions where candidates did not campaingn in public their very names were often not listed due to security concerns, and with a significant number of people not voting because they felt they had nothing for which to vote.
Friedman is right that only Arab progressives can fight the war that needs to be fought. He is wrong about Mr. Bush's "instincts". Bush wants American troops to remain in Iraq and enforce a colonial arrangement in which Iraq's wealth will be sent, in liquid form, to New York City and Houston. In spite of the noble rhetoric in which Bush cloaks his war, it was nothing more than gunboat diplomacy with Cruise missiles.
Democracy was not on the ballot in Iraq on Sunday. The main choices were a slate of candidates running under the auspices of Ayatollah Sistani which seems to want to turn Iraq into Iran-lite and a slate of candidates headed by Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi quisling who remains in power with the support of foreign troops and would do little more than legitimize the colonial occupation of his own nation. Neither or these slates can be said to embody democratic principles.
What was on the ballot was a referndum on Mr. Bush's occupation of Iraq. In that, a vote for Sistani's slate was a vote against Bush and a vote for Allawi's was a vote for it. To almost no one's surprise, the preliminary reposts indicate that Sistani's slate has about a 3:1 lead over Allawi's.
Regrettably, the Iraqi people could not vote for democracy last Sunday. But they could vote for sovereignty -- freedom from neoconservative occupation. That, it appears, is what they have done.
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