From "how they see us", world opinion of US/Iraq, post elections.
After another successful election, Iraqis are feeling more confident that things are going to continue getting better.
1/6/2006
Iraq is becoming a great American success story, said Barry Cooper in the Calgary Herald. While reports from Baghdad focus on bombings or spotty electricity, two-thirds of Iraqis “agree things are better than they were under Saddam.” And an astonishing 80 percent are confident they’ll be better still next year. They are embracing democracy with gusto. After decades of dictatorship, Iraqis voted three times in the past year—and turnout was bigger each time. The last election, for parliament in December, was the crowning achievement. The campaign was heated, with “quarreling, disagreeable pundits” debating the issues on Al-Jazeera—“pretty good evidence that normal democratic politics could be transplanted to the country.” And the Sunnis, who had boycotted earlier polls, turned out in huge numbers. That’s largely because of savvy U.S. negotiations that exploited “fault lines in the Sunni community.” The Americans managed to split “the native-born and largely secular and nationalist Sunnis, who were also often former Saddamites” and Baathists, from the Sunni jihadists. Now the jihadists are discredited and the insurgency is “pretty much over.”
Now that we’ve had our election, said Baghdad’s Al-Bayyinah in an editorial, the Americans can back off. Shiites in Iraq are certainly “thankful to the Americans for toppling Saddam.” But our gratitude goes only so far. After all, the Americans owed it to us to get rid of the dictator after their “treacherous stand in 1991,” when they told Shiites to rise up against him and then abandoned us to be slaughtered in the tens of thousands. Now it seems they are maneuvering behind the scenes, “trying to strike secret deals” with former Baathists in “a vile effort to rob Iraqis of the joy of a dazzlingly successful election.” That would be a fatal mistake. “Beware the wrath of the poor, whose patience is running out. And heed the Iraqi lion,” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, “when the time comes for him to utter his word.”
Don’t expect the U.S. to surrender its power over Iraq easily, said Tehran’s Jomhuri-ye Eslami in an editorial. The Americans have always planned to marginalize the Shiites. They “have kept the Baath Party on the shelf,” ready to be exploited at the proper time. As soon as it became obvious that the Shiites had won the elections, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Baghdad to meet with prominent Baathists. He secretly gave them “a large amount of financial aid” and told them to prevent a Shiite government in any way possible. The U.S. intends “to create more bloodshed in Iraq through the Baath Party, and thus continue the occupation until it can bring its own puppet government to power.”
The Iranians may be half-right, said Cengiz Candar in the Ankara, Turkey, New Anatolian. The Americans are, in fact, supporting the Sunnis to prevent the Shiites from utterly dominating Iraq. But that’s because Shiite domination equals Iranian domination. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, it never intended “to hand the country over to a pro-Iranian elected theocracy.” But that’s what the December parliamentary elections seem to have wrought. So the U.S. has turned to Turkey, a secular but mostly Sunni country, to help with the anti-American Sunni Baathists. For centuries, Iraq has been a kind of “wrestling mat” where Turkey and Iran grapple for influence. The U.S., its plans shattered, must now rely on the eternals of “geopolitics.”
http://www.theweekmagazine.com/article.aspx?id=1269
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