War Stories (55 page)

      
Baghdad, Iraq

      
Thursday, 3 February 2005

      
1030 Hours Local

It's now happened twice in less than four months, though it is more rare than an eclipse of the sun, a shooting star, or a volcanic eruption. It ought to be celebrated as a magnificent, historic event, but it isn't.

I'm referring to the Sunday, 30 January 2005, Iraqi election. Like the October election in Afghanistan before it, it signifies the birth of a new democracy. Both elections mark the first vote of a long-oppressed people, yet the media presents them as dangerous events.

For months, the so-called mainstream media has struggled to depict the Iraqi elections as a fools' errand foisted on the people of Iraq by George W. Bush. When I was in London last week, the BBC and many European newspapers were predicting an “invalid outcome” because “the Sunni population is boycotting the vote.”

Last Tuesday, Senate opponents of the president's Iraq policy lined up behind Robert Byrd and Teddy Kennedy to declare Iraq to be “a quagmire . . . a total failure.”

And despite a pre-election poll of 33,000 Iraqis by the Arabic paper
Asharq Al-Awsat
, in which 72.4 percent said they intended to vote—the U.S. media continue to denigrate the process. “Is a 50 or 60 percent turnout enough?” reporters skeptically asked the White House, State Department, and every U.S. and Iraqi official they could find in Baghdad. But when 60 percent of American voters went to the polls in November, it was considered a “historic” turnout. You just can't please the press.

But all of this misses the point. Iraqis came out in unprecedented numbers, despite nine suicide bombers and insurgents firing mortars in Election Day attacks. Iraqis voted for members of provincial
parliaments and a 270-member National Assembly, which will write Iraq's constitution. Sunday's election was the first multi-party election in more than fifty years—and the first in the entire 5,000-year history of Mesopotamia where every man and woman, regardless of tribe, religion, or ethnic origin, was allowed to cast a ballot.

Even Arab television outlets, like Al Jazeera, documented this “grand moment in Iraqi history,” as the president said in his news conference. Sunday's election was an instant success and a remarkable accomplishment—first because the terrorists tried so hard to stop it and failed; second, because more than 17,000 candidates were willing to put their lives on the line, vying for 270 seats in the first freely elected National Assembly in the long history of Mesopotamia; and finally, because so many Iraqi women braved bombs, bullets, threats, and intimidation to go to the polls.

Watching the Iraqis proudly hold up thumbs dipped in ink as evidence that they had voted brought tears even to the eyes of cynics in Europe and the doubters in America.

It was the same last October, when whole Afghani families walked miles, skirting minefields and defying threats from Taliban thugs, just to vote. There, it was Moqadasa Sidiqi, a nineteen-year-old woman, who cast the first ballot in Afghanistan's history.
A woman cast the first ballot!

Here in Iraq, the “feminine factor” is also going to be profoundly important to the country's future—far more so than whether the voter is a Sunni or a Shi'ite. By law, one-third of the new National Assembly must be women. Women are about to transform Iraq, just as they are transforming Afghanistan.

Last summer I interviewed the elected governor of Al Anbar province, Iraq's largest, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Months before this momentous election, he told me: “Women voting will change everything. No woman who carries a child for nine months
wants that child to grow up to be a suicide terrorist. They want the politicians to give their children something to live for, not die for—and we will have to do it.”

Most secular and religious leaders in Iraq echo that judgment—it's only the radical few who want to turn the country back to the Middle Ages. The National Assembly elected on Sunday will not only name a president, two deputy presidents, a prime minister, and a cabinet, but will also produce a new constitution by 15 August 2005. That constitution will then be submitted to a popular referendum—a second free election by mid-October. This new Iraqi constitution will become the law of the land if affirmed by a majority of the voters nationwide. Approval of the constitution will yield yet a third free election on 15 December 2005, to elect a new government.

All of this seems to have escaped the attention of the president's critics in our media—as did the television ads produced by pro-democracy organizations to encourage Iraqi turnout. In one, an elderly man is confronted on the street by a group of masked, armed thugs. The man is soon joined by a handful of his neighbors, then more, until the mass of people greatly outnumber the terrorists, who set off running from the crowd of ordinary, unarmed, but courageous Iraqis.

The voiceover says: “On January 30, we meet our destiny and our duty. We are not alone, and we are not afraid. Our strength is in our unity; together we will work, and together prevail.” No ad like this could have possibly run under Saddam's rule.

The terrorist in chief in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, in a statement showing just how desperate the insurgents were to prevent democracy from taking root, condemned the elections. “We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology.” He went on to brand anyone who took part as an “infidel.”

President Bush, in his second inaugural address, said, “By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well—a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”

As if to validate both his remarks and the power of the Iraqi ballots, the television cameras panned to a touching, powerful scene in the balcony as the president delivered his State of the Union address on 2 February. Standing next to Laura Bush was Sofia Taleb al-Suhail, an Iraqi woman who had just voted, and behind her, Janet and Bill Norwood, the parents of Marine Corps Sgt. Byron Norwood of Pflugerville, Texas, who was killed during the assault on Fallujah. Mr. and Mrs. Norwood stood to enthusiastic and sustained applause. The applause became thunderous when Sofia reached over and hugged Janet. That woman-to-woman connection told much more eloquently than any pundit's analysis just what the Iraqi story is all about.

It was an ember from the fire that President Bush said is blazing in Iraq. And, God willing, may it soon spread to some of those other dark corners of the Middle East.

   
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM SIT REP #53

      
Washington, DC

      
Friday, 11 March 2005

      
2245 Hours Local

Ever since U.S. troops first went to Afghanistan in October 2001, our supposedly more experienced “betters” in Europe and the “prudent potentates of the press” have warned us that U.S. military action against an Islamic nation was dangerous. They said that attacking Muslims would cause the “Arab street” to rise up and crush us. This
theme was widely replayed in the buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom—and has been reiterated many times in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's capture.

Since his second inaugural address, President Bush has repeatedly been castigated for his “naiveté” on one hand and for his “aggressive arrogance” on the other. Why? Because he boldly tells those who suffer tyranny that the United States “will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

Yet, despite the carping critics—and the carnage caused by those who would rather die than see freedom flourish—any objective observer has to conclude that George W. Bush is right. “The call of freedom” does indeed come “to every mind and every soul.” Even in the Middle East freedom is indeed on the march—even down the “Arab street.”

It was evident last October in Afghanistan, in the ballots cast by Palestinians in early January and in late January on the ink-stained fingers of Iraqi men and women, raised in proud defiance against murderous thugs who would return them to brutal bondage.

Whether the America-haters and Bush-bashers want to acknowledge it or not, the “call of freedom” is genuine. And it's now being heard in places where American “influence” has long been deemed by the “experts” to be minimal, at best. Here are examples:

   
In December, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians peacefully protested to force a new election when a rigged vote installed Vladimir Putin's handpicked presidential candidate. As a result, reformist Viktor Yushchenko governs today in Kiev. The Bush administration needed to do little more than lend its voice to the calls for a free and fair election.

   
Last week, in long-suffering Syrian-occupied Lebanon, tens of thousands unarmed Christian and Muslim civilians protested the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, forcing the resignation of Syria's puppet government in Beirut. In the aftermath, the new Iraqi government—and even the French—joined our call for the Syrians to withdraw their forces from Lebanon and deport the residue of Saddam's regime hiding there.