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It Was Worth It
Rich Galen Monday January 31, 2005
Saturday night at 11:30 pm Eastern time, I was on the Fox set with Tony Snow looking at live pictures of a polling place in Baghdad which was � empty.
Because I am good at this, I pointed out to Mr. Snow that (a) as it was 7 AM in Baghdad, it barely dawn there, (b) it is quite cold this time of year, and (c) Middle Easterners are not noted for subscribing to the "early to bed, early to rise" theory of daily activities.
But the truth was, I was feared the elections would not be as successful as I had projected on Friday when I suggested that:
"If anything in the area of 9 million Iraqis vote (60% of 15 million) then Iraqis will have voted in the same ratio as Americans."
My numbers were a little off, as there were between 13 and 14 million registered to vote and it seems that something over 8 million may have voted but the ration is largely correct. About the same percentage of Iraqis voted Sunday as Americans who voted last November. And no one was threatening to blow up polling places in the US.
By yesterday afternoon, it had become clear that the voting in Iraq was going very well, in spite of some eight suicide attacks at polling places designed to scare people away.
By yesterday evening it was obvious that this first free election in more than 40 years was a resounding success.
I was surprised at how emotional I got as I read the wire copy.
I began to think about all of the coalition members - Americans and others, civilian and military - who had spent time in Iraq; who had been injured in Iraq; who had died in Iraq.
I remembered teaching a class in democratic politics to a group of Shiite women in Hillah with Brad Smith, Rep. David Drier's chief of staff. The woman who ran that program, Fern Holland, and a colleague were killed in a highway ambush a few weeks later.
I remembered the night Time Magazine reporter Michael Weiskopf was riding with a convoy when someone threw a hand grenade into his humvee. Michael had the presence of mind to pick it up and throw it out saving five lives, but at the cost of his right hand.
I remembered the excitement of the day that Saddam Hussein was captured, and I remembered the bravery of the CPA staff who went out into Baghdad and beyond every day helping the fledgling Iraqi ministries get ready to take back their government by June 30 last year.
I remembered the young men and women in the military who did their jobs every day because they had been trained to do those jobs and understood why it was important they be done well.
I also remembered that, too often, they had to take on the additional burden of protecting a middle aged civilian who showed up to travel with them to odd corners of the country. And I remembered they did that job with the same professionalism and good humor as they did everything else.
But in the end, it wasn't about Americans, or Brits, or Poles, or South Koreans, or anyone else. In the end it came down to the Iraqis. Either they wanted this election to be successful or they didn't. Either they considered it to be important or they didn't.
They did.
I spoke, yesterday, to Susan Phalen who was one of those brave people with whom I worked in Iraq. She was in northern Iraq to do press wrangling on behalf of the US State Department and told me this story:
An old man came in to vote. He was too frail to walk so he was carried in on the back of a much younger man. He voted, triumphantly turned to the observers, and said in Arabic, "If I can vote, every Iraqi can vote."
When she looked at the assembled journalists to see how they were responding, every one had tears in their eyes.
It was worth it.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the Associated Press summary of the elections; a Mullfoto which only men will appreciate; and a telling Catchy Caption of the Day.
--END --
Copyright © 2005 Richard A. Galen
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