The naysers on Iraq have gotten it wrong at every step. Most recently, they are saying the outcome of the vote is non-representative because the Sunnis didn’t vote. Well folks, that simply is not a true statement.
Based on their demographic strength, the Arab Sunnis should have 42 seats in the 275-seat transitional National Assembly. The final results show that the new assembly will have 49 Arab Sunnis sitting in it. Of these 40 were elected on the Shia-led and the Kurdish lists, plus the list headed by Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister. Five were elected on a list led by Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer, the Arab Sunni interim President, while four more won within smaller alliances. If we add the Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslims, at least 110 members of the assembly are Sunnis.
Statistically this makes the Sunnis represented proportional to their overall presence in the general population. The larger theme of the story in the London Time's is that their are a lot of Arab dictators looking over their shoulder.
The Arab despots and their friends in the West make a meal of the cliché that democracy cannot be imposed by force. But what happened in Iraq was not imposing democracy by force. The US-led alliance used force to remove impediments to democracy. The people of Iraq became the co-liberators of their country, first by not opposing the US-led coalition and then by risking their lives to set their nation on a new path in the face of vicious terrorism.
Let freedom ring.
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