‘Purple-finger revolution’ is a vindication of U.S. policy
For the third time in a year, Iraqis confounded the world as they went to the polls Dec. 15 to electing a new 275-member parliament under the constitution they voted for in October.
Here are a few remarkable facts jubilantly reported soon after polling closed by the widely read Iraqi blogger based in Baghdad, “Mohammed of Iraq The Model”:
– Security provided by the new Iraqi army and police was much improved since the last two elections, in January and October;
– The registered voters listwas increased, adding a million new Iraqi citizens who turned 18 this year;
– The estimated turnout of voters exceeded 15 million.
The credit for such an election—the first of its kind not only in Iraq’s history but across the Arab-Muslim world—belongs to the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, which is responsible for the functioning of the country’s new democracy.
Skeptics and cynics will insist Iraqi democracy is a cup half-empty, pointing to the persistence of terrorist violence. But as Mohammed notes, “All the assassinations and intimidation that preceded the election could not stop the process.”
It was not going to be easy to help the cause of freedom in a part of the world that has been most resistant to its meaning and practice. And the dragon of tyranny does not die without thrashing around destructively in its death throes.
On the eve of the vote, U.S. President George Bush said, “We are living through a watershed moment in the story of freedom.” The idea of freedom being infectious, Iraqi Sunnis joined their compatriots, Shiites and Kurds, to vote.
John Burns, Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times, observed Sunnis displaying “new willingness to distance themselves from the insurgency, an absence of hostility for Americans, a casual contempt for Saddam Hussein, a yearning…to find a place for themselves in the post-Hussein Iraq.”
Moreover, Iraq’s purple-finger revolution—the right to vote freely and elect government accountable to the people (voters’ fingers are stained purple after they cast their ballot)—is being watched across the Middle East as the question looms ever larger: If Iraq can be free and democratic, why not then Syria, or Egypt, or any other of the Arab League’s 22 member states?
Recently Fouad Ajami, an Arab-American professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote after a tour of the Middle East, “To venture into the Arab world is to travel into Bush Country.”
The march of Iraqi democracy vindicates Bush. It says how wrong the Democrats are in their shrill opposition to his administration—joining forces with the lunatic left, and abandoning any responsible understanding of history except for clinging to the mistaken lesson of Vietnam, when defeat in Indo-China was engineered by a most self-indulgent generation of Americans at home.
Iraqis have proven how cynical remains the politics of old Europe, the extent to which France will indulge dictators in pursuit of imaginary grandeur, and how corrupt the United Nations is in accepting bribes (as the oil-for-food scandal revealed) while remaining oblivious to yet another African genocide in Darfur.
The Iraqi vote also exposes the empty platitudes of our own Paul Martin and the lib-left, and the widening disconnect between Canada’s sense of purpose and its increasingly inconsequential foreign policy of appeasing rogue regimes gathered at the UN.
Iraqis have a distance to go in consolidating their freedom.
They know best, however, what failure would mean, and this knowledge is their guarantee for securing Iraq’s democracy while honoring the memory of American, British and coalition soldiers who died for their freedom.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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