Iraq - Free At Last

Seems the Iraqis feel their elections set them free at last. That's according to The New York Times no less. Not to worry though, the NYT still manage to insert their bias into the story. But it is good to see them reporting on some good news from Iraq for a change.

All that seemed to change last Sunday, when millions of Iraqis streamed to the polls. Few if any Iraqis had ever voted in anything approaching a free election, yet most seemed to know exactly what the exercise was about: selecting their own representatives to lead their own country.

"Our dilemma is solved," said Rashid Majid, 80, who wore his best jacket to the polls. "We will follow our new leaders, because we have chosen them."

Some Iraqis saw in the election their own liberation, one that many did not feel on April 9, 2003. Mr. Hussein's regime was not toppled by Iraqis but by the American military, a fact that has lingered in Iraqi minds.

Yet after casting ballots in a free election, conducted by more than 100,000 Iraqi poll workers, many Iraqis said they finally felt free - not only from the terrors of the old regime, but also from acute feelings of humiliation about the American occupation.

Now it seems they want America to stay after all.

The new mood appears to have continued since election day. The calls by candidates for a timetable for American military withdrawal have died away. Even a group of Sunni politicians decided last week that they would take part in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution without insisting on a timetable.

Getting Iraqis to take charge of their own affairs, whether by fighting insurgents or taking over government ministries, has been the goal of American leaders here since the fall of Saddam Hussein. After 22 months of trying to persuade the Iraqis to stand on their own, while doing everything for them, the Americans may be finding that Iraqis, now fully sovereign, don't want them to go home so soon after all.

UPDATE:

Even The BBC are forced to report on the Iraq's desire for America to stay awhile longer.

FG: Hugh, what is the talk there regarding the ending of the occupation?

HS: There's some talk. People don't like being occupied; it's pretty straightforward. They do regard it as an occupation, but some regard it as a benign occupation. Others are critical of the occupation, and the time that it's taken to reach this point. Maybe, they wonder, there would have been less violence if sovereignty and elections had happened sooner. But now is now, a lot of people keep telling me, and there's a lot of realism. For example, I asked Alaa [spelling?] a market trader... I asked him... about ending the occupation. 'No way,' he replied.

Alaa: If any kind of foreign forces leave Iraq, there will be no Iraq. We need American and British and any foreign experience to control the country again, because 35 years of Saddam's dictatory, we lost the rules, we lost how to control a country by a parliament. There was one man ruling the whole thing. I haven't been in any kind of elections since was I born.
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