Iraq's First Vote

Today marks the first time in decades that the Iraqi people had something resembling open elections. I say resembling since the situation on the ground in Iraq has been sufficiently violent to render the Iraqi political environment rather opaque.

Of course, the United States (in particular G. W. Bush) are proclaiming this to be some kind of historic event. The outcome has yet to be seen, and will be somewhat suspect anyhow. At least one of the major tribal groups in Iraq has not been fully voiced:

But reports from central Sunni cities, such as Falluja, Samarra and Ramadi, say not all polling stations opened, and there was at best a trickle of voters.

For all that the Sunni are the group that backed Saddam Hussein, no vote which excludes a significant proportion of a nation's populus can be considered valid.

Held against a backdrop of near civil war conditions in Iraq, and a nation under foreign occupation, the world must hold the outcome of this vote with some suspicion. At the same time, the Iraqi people are to be congratulated on what appears to be a high voter turnout, in spite of car bombings and strongarm tactics of various players.

It will be a long road for Iraq to achieve what I understand democracy to be. I suspect that the tribal/regional divisions of the country will ultimately sunder it into three smaller powers before freedoms of speech, press and association manage to become part of the national psyche.

Although Bush and Blair will trumpet this election as validating the "rightness" of their campaign in Iraq, the world - especially the Arab world - will not easily forget that the pretext for invading Iraq was based on what could only be politely be described as a fiction.