I have many mixed feelings on this election. It is difficult to get ones mind around the situation after having been bombarded by the media coverage. You have to pry your brain away from the superficial frame that measures whether it has gone good or bad by the amount of violence and the number of people actually voting. My first impulse was to think “Iraqis are participating in a democratic process, that’s good right, I mean who could argue with that? I hope that everything turns out well because the Iraqis have certainly dealt with enough trouble. Bush is using it to make himself look good but he does that with everything.”

It’s difficult to even come up with a critical question to ask after watching the events unfold in the popular media. This is why one must look for alternative sources of information, at the very least it snaps your brain away long enough to start coming up with a more complex understanding of the situation. It’s not always this difficult to see world affairs through a critical lens, but I had a hard time coming to grips with the Iraqi election.

I had to backup and think, what are we trying to achieve, and what are the Iraqis trying to achieve. Really the beliefs of the Iraqis are the most important, we can say we’re spreading democracy till we’re blue in the face, but Iraqis determine what actually happens. So I went looking for an Iraqi perspective. Robert Fisk is covering the story for the UK Independent, he was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and he made some interesting observations.

One is that the Sunni Muslim minority that had been in power for a long time barely participated. They make up about 20% of the population, they have the most to lose, and they’re the main force behind the insurgency, but they didn’t vote. So the insurgents didn’t really give democracy a chance to solve their problems. If they aren’t using peaceful means like voting probably they won’t start reducing attacks any time soon.

The second thing that really struck me was the aims of those who did vote. Below is a paraphrase of what Fisk said about the Shiites who were voting.

“The Shiites were not voting for democracy, although they’d very much like to have it and believe in it, many of them expressed their views very forthrightly inside the polling station, 'we’re coming to vote because Al Sistani told us too, because we weren’t allowed to do so before, and because we want the Americans to leave.' Now it’s all very well for the American media to say that they came to vote for democracy, they probably did, but they also came because they think and believe and are convinced of the fact that by voting they will have a free country without an occupation force.”

That’s the key to this whole situation, the success of this election should be judged by whether or not it leads immediately to a change in the lives of everyday people in Iraq. The people of Iraq want the Americans to leave, the Shiites have decided to try peaceful means and vote just like we told them to. They expect things to change, and they expect the occupation to end, and America has less time to fulfill that demand than we would hope. If they see no change and they begin to feel betrayed, what will happen then? JFK explained it best when he said "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

If America does not take this election seriously, and if we do not actively show those in Iraq that peaceful means of change are effective, then this election will go very badly, because more groups will join in the violence. Bush is using this election as a prop to show the American people that we are making progress in Iraq, it is not difficult to convince the American people because we experience things from a safe distance through popular media channels, the difficult task is to show Iraqis. I hope that this is a milestone for Iraq, it can be the point at which peaceful means of change are finally taken seriously.

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