[Mb-civic] OP-ED COLUMNIST A Day to Remember By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 3, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Day to Remember
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

As someone who believed, hoped, worried, prayed, worried, hoped and prayed
some more that Iraqis could one day pull off the election they did, I am
unreservedly happy about the outcome - and you should be, too.

Why? Because what threatens America most from the Middle East are the
pathologies of a region where there is too little freedom and too many young
people who aren't able to achieve their full potential. The only way to cure
these pathologies is with a war of ideas within the Arab-Muslim world so
those with bad ideas can be defeated by those with progressive ones.

We can't fight that war. Only the Arab progressives can - only they can tell
the suicide bombers that what they are doing is shameful to Islam and to
Arabs. But we can collaborate with them to create a space in the heart of
their world where decent people have a chance to fight this war - and that
is what American and British soldiers have been doing in Iraq.

President Bush's basic gut instinct about the need to do this is exactly
right. His thinking that this could be done on the cheap, though, with
little postwar planning, was exactly wrong. Partly as a result, this great
moment has already cost America over $100 billion and 10,000 killed and
wounded.

That is not sustainable because the road ahead in Iraq is still long. We
have to proceed with more wisdom and more allies. But proceed we must, and
now we can at least do so with the certainty that partnering with the Iraqi
people to build a decent consensual government is not crazy - it's really
difficult, but not crazy.

But wait - not everyone is wearing a smiley face after the Iraqi elections,
and that is good, considering who is unhappy. Let's start with the mullahs
in Iran. Those who think that a Shiite-led government in Iraq is going to be
the puppet of Iran's Shiite ayatollahs are so wrong. It is the ayatollahs in
Iran who are terrified today. You see, the Iranian mullahs and their
diplomats like to peddle the notion that they have their own form of
democracy: "Islamic democracy." But this is a fraud, and the people who know
best that it's a fraud are the ayatollahs and the Iranian people.

When any Iranian reform candidate who wants to run can be vetoed by
unelected ayatollahs, and any Iranian newspaper can be shut by the same
theocrats, that is not democracy. You can call that whatever you want, but
not democracy. They don't allow bikinis at nudist colonies and they don't
serve steak at vegetarian restaurants, and theocrats don't veto candidates
in real democracies. The Iraqi Shiites just gave every Iranian Shiite next
door a demonstration of what real "Islamic" democracy is: it's when Muslims
vote for anyone they want. I just want to be around for Iran's next
election, when the ayatollahs try to veto reform candidates and Iranian
Shiites ask, Why can't we vote for anyone, like Iraqi Shiites did? Oh, boy,
that's going to be pay-per-view.

Then there is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This Charles-Manson-with-a-turban who
heads the insurgency in Iraq had a bad hair day on Sunday. I wonder whether
anyone told him about the suicide bomber who managed to blow up only himself
outside a Baghdad polling station and how Iraqi voters walked around his
body, spitting on it as they went by. Zarqawi claims to be the leader of the
Iraqi Vietcong - the authentic carrier of Iraqis' national aspirations and
desire to liberate their country from "U.S. occupation." In truth, he is the
leader of the Iraqi Khmer Rouge - a murderous death cult.

The election has exposed this. Because the Iraqi people have now made it
clear that they are the authentic carriers of their national aspirations,
and while, yes, they want an end to the U.S. presence, they want that end to
happen in an orderly manner and in tandem with an Iraqi constitutional
process.

In other words, this election has made it crystal clear that the Iraq war is
not between fascist insurgents and America, but between the fascist
insurgents and the Iraqi people. One hopes the French and Germans, whose
newspapers often sound more like Al Jazeera than Al Jazeera, will wake up to
this fact and throw their weight onto the right side of history.

It's about time, because whatever you thought about this war, it's not about
Mr. Bush any more. It's about the aspirations of the Iraqi majority to build
an alternative to Saddamism. By voting the way they did, in the face of real
danger, Iraqis have earned the right to ask everyone now to put aside their
squabbles and focus on what is no longer just a pipe dream but a real
opportunity to implant decent, consensual government in the heart of the
Arab-Muslim world.

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