Let Us Now Praise Some Brave Iraqis
By Richard Davis (01/26/05)
While Michael Moore celebrates the butchery of Iraqi "insurgents," whom he compares to the Minutemen of America’s Revolutionary War, let the rest of us pay tribute to the extraordinary courage being displayed by thousands of everyday Iraqis as they prepare for elections. They may reshape history as dramatically as did the real Minutemen two and a half centuries ago.
Imagine their electoral process. Simply registering to vote can get you killed. Putting your name on the ballot, as hundreds have done, is the equivalent of painting a target on your back. One report predicts that 80 percent of Iraqis will go the polls. Nearly everyone agrees that some of them are going to die exercising that privilege, blown apart by the lunatics bred by Saddam and radical Islam.
If nothing else, this election is doing what the coalition hasn’t been able to do since the invasion -- drawing a clear line between ordinary Iraqis and the killers. The line blurs a bit still, particularly when Americans are the victims of violence, but the world can finally see that there are indeed civilized people hiding among the savages.
So what’s going on? Is something about to go horribly aright in Iraq?
Who knows. Our sources of information are sketchy at best and wholly unreliable. The world’s media, ours included, are unanimously opposed to Bush and the Iraqi effort. Anything but failure disappoints their story line. But, to be fair, Baghdad isn’t Paris (yet) either. Even Moore, an apologist for the killers, wouldn’t stick his fat neck out in that city. Reporting only from a tiny green zone limits the breadth of one’s bias.
Six weeks ago the situation as presented by the media appeared completely hopeless, and the will to continue the fight seemed to retreat en masse from Americans (myself included). Now inexplicably Iraqis seem to be rising themselves en masse in support of the election. Where did that come from? Could Bush be onto something with this liberty and democracy stuff?
The truth is this vote means as much to America as it does to Iraq. Finally a sign may be at hand that order can be wrenched from this chaos. We need desperately to know that.
But that certainly doesn’t mean Iraqis have suddenly converted to our side. Remember the Iraqi soccer team at the Olympics? The world applauded what it thought was a team fighting heroically under the banner of a free Iraq for the first time in the nation’s history. Then when interviewed the players turned out to be pro-Saddam thugs wishing they were back in Iraq killing Americans.
Something similar might be at work in Iraq today. We know at least some of the Shiites, desirous of a theocracy, are democracy haters going to the polls as a means to enforce their will onto everybody else (in which case, technically speaking, they’re comparable to our Democrats, not our Minutemen). Everyone else is wishing, fingers crossed, that they’re only a small minority.
The most affecting stories coming from that country--and even these are few--concern the women. Women have the power to transform that part of the world, and they’ve been guaranteed at least 25 percent of the seats in the provisional government. But standing up, as many of them are doing, in that culture of violence and misogyny requires faith and courage that few of us Westerners can comprehend. God be with them.
Many of us want to see something of an exit strategy developed for this campaign, and a successful election might offer some hope. The permanent government will be elected late this year. That looks like a dim light at the end of this tunnel. However, we might be invited to stay, this time by Iraqis themselves. But at that point, we should have more worldwide (and Iraqi) cooperation. What country could watch Iraqi men and women braving death to form their first democratic government, slaughtered as they go the polls by forces of hate and repression, and then remain uncommitted. France, sure, but what country not half way down the toilet?
Thus we stand at a curious place. After depending almost solely on the incredible courage and dedication of our own soldiers to carry our country’s banner in that hostile region of the world, we now find ourselves dependent on the courage of the Iraqis. Everything depends on what they do this weekend. I’m not much of a religious man, but this seems like a good time for a few prayers.
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