Weaving A Country

From Investors Business Daily:
Posted 12/15/2005

The Iraq Election:
It was a day when everything went right. Iraqis of all stripes — Sunni Arab, Kurd, Shiite — flocked to the polls. Violence was sporadic at worst. So why not indulge in some optimism for a change?

We direct that question at observers such as Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, who was doing his best Thursday to play down the prospects of peace, stability and democracy in Iraq. "The truth of the matter is, there's a simmering civil war here," he told CNN.

Biden does see a glimmer of hope in the latest election and the prospects for a fairer constitution. But if the differences among Iraqis aren't hashed out in six months, he predicted, "we haven't seen anything like the civil war you'll see then, and I'm afraid it will develop into a regional war."

This image of Iraq as a country on the brink of chaos is a staple of the "realists" who think President Bush is on a quixotic mission to plant democracy in a land that has never known it and never will. Its subtext is that Iraqis, and most other people of the Middle East, are too consumed by ancient sectarian and ethnic hatreds to live together without autocratic supervision.

By itself, Thursday's voting doesn't fully refute such a pessimistic view. It'll take time — a lot more than Biden's six-month timetable — to see if Iraq can truly remain a viable democracy for the long run.
It's true that the constitution is still a work in progress and that fundamental issues of power-sharing, allocation of oil wealth and protection of minority rights are still being worked out. Iraqis have a challenging agenda, no doubt about that.

But consider the challenges they faced just over two years ago. The U.S. invasion removed a totalitarian dictatorship and left them to build a nation from scratch. Not only did they have no experience with self-government, but also they were divided by religious sects, ethnicity and violent oppression that cried out for revenge.

And the Americans, at least at first, were doing distressingly little to keep order.

The ingredients were there for war. What happened instead was that most Iraqis — Shiites and Kurds — eschewed violence from the start and pinned their hopes on a democracy.

Sunni Arabs took a more roundabout path that, we now see, has reached the same end. At first they rejected the democratic experiment, and many of them cast their lot with the insurgency.

But after boycotting the January 2005 elections and letting Shiites and Kurds shape the new
constitution, they realized what a serious mistake they had made. On Thursday, they crowded polling places even in insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi.

This is not the behavior of people sliding toward civil war. Rather, it's democratic nation-building in action.

Thursday's vote will advance that project in a number of ways — by giving Sunni Arabs a significant share of parliamentary seats, weakening sectarian Shiite parties and encouraging coalition-building among secular Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds. The prospects for a fully representative government have grown much brighter.

The political haggling to shape the new government may not be quick or quiet. Ditto for the debate over the constitution, which the Sunnis want changed to prevent their own marginalization in the new Iraq. Politics being politics, there will be strife. Doomsayers will continue to see war in the wings.

But as long as the vast majority of Iraqis decide they'd rather live in peace than shed one another's blood, they'll continue to prove the pessimists wrong. As Zuhiar al-Zahawi, a Sunni living in Baghdad, told The New York Times: "We will talk to each other, and we will connect with each other, and we will weave the country together like a piece of cloth."

His fellow citizens have already gone a long way toward making that hope a reality.