Iraq’s constitutional referendum last week went better than anticipated, given the daily violence in the areas of the country dominated by the Sunni majority. Unofficial results indicate Iraqis voted heavily in favour of adopting the new constitution.
The results of last January’s election are vindicated as Iraqis now prepare for parliamentary elections scheduled for Dec. 15, and the making of a new government for a free and democratic Iraq.
Last month in this space, I predicted a favourable outcome for the Oct. 15 vote. The reasoning was simple.
I suggested since half the voting population are women they would vote massively in support of the draft constitution, hoping to secure for themselves and their children a better future.
A better future for Iraq and the Arab-Muslim world will most definitely be determined only by the extent to which Muslim women acquire their rights to be free and equal.
Four days after the referendum, the world and, most importantly, Iraqis, watched Saddam Hussein appear in the prisoner’s dock as the first of many charges against him were read out in court. The sight of the tyrant facing a special tribunal arranged to prosecute him and senior members of his regime is a political earthquake whose tremors will resonate for a long time across the Middle East.
Never before—anywhere in the Arab world—has a population participated freely and willingly in the shaping of its government as Iraqis are doing—despite the tremendous violence directed against them by bloody-minded insurgents. Never, in the 1,400 years of Islam, has an Arab-Muslim despot been brought into a court of justice to answer for crimes of rape, torture and murder of people under him.
This is a uniquely riveting moment in Arab-Muslim history, and everyone in the region is mesmerized by the events occurring in Iraq.
But none of this could have been imagined without regime change in Baghdad. The midwife of a new Arab politics is, without any quibble, U.S. President George Bush.
It needs repeating that without Bush’s decision for regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the sacrifices of U.S. and coalition soldiers, more than 50 million Muslims would not have been liberated.
The domino effect of freedom in the heart of the Muslim world is already visible in the region. We are seeing a reluctant acknowledgment by autocrats of opening societies to greater participation by their citizens as Iraqis, with American support, build an Arab model of democratic government to which others may aspire.
But then there is the Paris-Berlin axis, whose politicians and opinion-makers remain alert to denigrate the sacrifices of others in expanding liberty’s frontiers. France is also the pontificating power that, when confronted with demands for freedom in its colonies, bore down with heavy hands upon the colonized (e.g., in Algeria).
There is also the mainstream lib-left media in North America whose instincts are to bury or tear down anyone or anything that has a whiff of nobility or goodness in it.
Moreover, in the realm of blinkered thinking and political fiction inhabited by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore and their supporters, America has never done any good, and any faults of the likes of Saddam, Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe can readily be attributed to some “root causes” originating in the perfidy of Anglo-American imperialism.
History would be incomplete without such irony. And Iraqis, in moving forward, will discover freedom brings new risks and responsibilities as some among them stumble out of weakness or ingratitude.
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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