Look beyond the jockeying for jobs in Iraq's embryonic transitional government. Focus instead on the final results in that Arab country's matrix-breaking election. They reveal a little-publicized result that President Bush, feminist organizations and democracy advocates should be shouting from the rooftops.
Favourite for presidency insists on a federal, secular state
An online protest Tuesday of Iran's crackdown against bloggers made an impact--even on Iranian officials.
The scientists, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told the group that they have submitted their findings to the journal Nature for publication in May, and their paper currently is being peer reviewed.
THE results of Iraq's first free elections are in. They're better than any realist could have expected. And, predictably, the media are grasping at every possible negative.
Especially worth reading is Rice's response to a question from the President of the French Council of Muslims.
The September 11 attack underlined, in the most terrible fashion, the consequences of our not-so-benign neglect of the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. From Morocco to Iran a huge swath of humanity was sunk in oppression, denied not just democracy but freedom of speech, property rights, freedom of association, freedom from fear and freedom to hope.
In a November 2003 speech, George Bush declared that Iraq was to be but the first instalment in a new American project. He argued that 60 years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East - all in the name of stability and security - had only contributed to the poisoning of the political order.
"I'm not backing down," she said. "For years we have been prevented from tasting what democracy is and it's important we go through with these elections." That iron resolve has cost her son's life and made targets of other relatives but the 46-year-old, representing the United Iraqi Alliance list, a grouping of big Shia parties which is expected to dominate the poll, is not for turning.
But Western media and governments are also handicapped in dealing with Iraq by a peculiar double standard regarding the very status of the Iraqi Arab Sunnis as a formerly-ruling, and oppressive, minority. Twenty years ago, nobody would have listened to the argument that dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the holding of elections there should be blocked out of fairness to the white minority in that country. Few today listen to those who declare that fair elections and the forging of a new political system in Northern Ireland should be delayed out of concern for the feelings of the Protestant minority.
..a recent poll by the London-based paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat found that 66% of those asked supported the elections on schedule. Iraqi women, who due to past bloodshed constitute a majority of the Iraqi population, are particularly interested.
Baghdad is in election fever, pasted with posters of candidates whose names most people don't even know
We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it,"
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