What's Next for Iraq?

I didn't watch much TV over the weekend, and when I did it was FoxNews. I saw the Beltway Boys, Media Watch, and then the Heartland. But when they started talking about Michael Jackson, I turned it off. So it was probably on one of those shows (or whatever was on after Heartland, before they mentioned Jacko) that I heard someone bring up the comparison between the Iraqi election and the Vietnam election of 1967. I was so busy being appalled, that I forgot to pay attention to who said it. After all, I already addressed that issue (isn't Big Media listening to me?).

It seems as though the left-leaning media delights in saying, "Yes, the elections went well, but of course the results aren't in yet." or "Yes, but of course the real test is what they do next." It's a cynical "yes, but" filled with the desire for something to happen that will discredit President Bush.

Then today I read an article that impressed me so much. It had a "yes, but" in it that struck me as completely without cynicism and instead full of a cautious hope. It's written by Kanan Makiya, a Shiite Iraqi, who is an author and founder of the Iraq Memory Foundation. He states, "The Iraqi elections are the second great Iraqi revolt against barbarism because the first took place during the uprising of 1991, when millions of Iraqis subjected to weeks of aerial bombardment took to the streets and begged the very allies who had been bombing them to help liberate them from Saddam's rule."

And so we finally did, but it was a long time--and a lot of dying--before it came.

Now that the second great Iraqi revolt against barbarism has occurred, we look forward. Mr. Makiya says, "The elections are ultimately about what it means to be an Iraqi in the post-Saddam era....

"Therefore I am both a happy man today, and a worried one.

"I am happy because the people of Iraq are once again taking responsibility for their own fate. But I am worried because it is not yet clear if any of the 7,636 candidates who had their names up for election are fully aware of the dangers that lie in store for their people."

And what are the dangers? Makiya speaks with more insight than any dozen media analysts I've seen, "Every Iraqi -- Kurd or Arab, Muslim or Christian, Shiite or Sunni -- became both complicit in the Baathist enterprise and its victim at the same time.

"When the Shiites become the majority in a duly elected Iraqi National Assembly, they will inherit the great burden of a fractured and deeply atomized country filled with minorities, all of whom have known suffering of one sort or another. How will they shoulder that responsibility?"

The most natural impulse will be for the Shiites to take control, with an underlying desire to either punish or subjugate other groups. But that impulse must be resisted. Makiya concludes, "We Iraqis tried dictatorship; in fact we took it further than almost anyone else in the world. Still it did not work. The country all but fell apart. But for a new inclusive idea of Iraq to take hold, the Shiites in particular have to make a very real sacrifice; they have to think beyond what is in their own self-interest, narrowly conceived. In so doing they might just become the agents for a genuine democratic transformation of the whole Middle East."

I pray that Kanan Makiya will be involved or consulted as Iraq's newly elected National Assembly begins to wrestle over just such issues.