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It will take weeks for the accurate count of votes cast in today's Iraqi elections to get finalized, but one common strain has come through in all reports during this historic day -- the Iraqis stood together as never before in their history. For a variety of reasons and motivations, all factions except the foreign terrorists of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi embraced the ballot over the bullet for the first time since the British cobbled together the nation of Iraq after the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. Millions of Iraqis from all factions -- ethnic, secular, geographic -- turned out despite the dangers of the Islamofascist lunatics that would rather kill Muslims than see them vote for their own leaders, and in defiance of the skeptics around the world who claim that Iraqis simply aren't worth the bother of liberation.
Look the people with purple-stained fingers in the eye and tell them that. I double-dog dare you.
One voter said: "This is stability, at last". Another, with tears in his eyes, told me: "This is the beginning of a new Iraq. I am so happy." ...Ali al-Musawi, a Shia Muslim originally from Sadr city said: "Iraq is like a ship in a storm being tossed form left to right, and now we need a new captain to take us to land and to safety."
One man hoped the election would bring an end to the occupation, but this would depend, he said, on maintaining unity. "Stability can only come from unity. When we have stability," he said, " then the Americans can go."
Initial estimates of the vote approach 15 million, about the same number as estimated that are eligible to vote at all. In previous elections, the chaotic nature of the coverage and the exit polling led to somewhat inflated numbers, and I suspect we'll see more of the same here. My guess is that with the Sunni participating enthusiastically and the Shi'ites more engaged in the parliamentary elections than in the slam-dunk plebescite that established the constitution (at least throughout most of their base) in October, the final count will come in around 13 million. That still represents close to a 90% voter turnout -- a mark unequalled for free multiparty elections in the West, and an indication of the thirst for liberty the long-oppressed Iraqis have.
The only losers in this election will be those who have told us over and over again that democracy could not be imposed at gunpoint. That the cut-and-run Coalition of the Gutless could still today stand and make that argument is a testament to the enduring power of freedom: stupidity and cravenness is no crime. The Iraqis didn't get democracy imposed on them at gunpoint at all. They had their oppressors removed at gunpoint -- and then the Anglo-Aussie-Italo-Polish-etc-American coalition kept them from falling prey to even more oppressors by gunpoint while they slowly took charge of their own destiny. No one who has watched the three free elections in Iraq this year could possibly describe the march to the polls as being "at gunpoint". These people rose up as a nation -- perhaps in this election especially for the first time -- in defiance of the guns and bombs of their erstwhile oppressors to take their nation back from them.
In doing so, they made fools of the people around the world who sold them short, who criticized George Bush and Tony Blair and John Howard for having the guts to stick by the Iraqis to make sure they got their chance at freedom. Those purple fingers point in accusation to those who doubt the power and desire of freedom, who claim that all forms of government have legitimacy depending on the kinds of people over which they rule. The purple fingers pull the mask off a global media effort to cast the situation in Iraq in the worst possible light to belittle the effort made by the West to rescue millions from hopeless tyranny and in so doing, keep their own people safer.
The purple fingers point the way to change the Middle East and turn it into a dynamo of philosophy, production, and freedom. They tell us we're winning, if some of us would only listen.
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