Monday, February 09, 2009

The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2009 (excerpts) – One sign that Iraq’s local elections went well on the weekend is that there’s been so little reporting of the event.
Maliki’s coalition ran on a nationalist platform, in contrast to a couple of the religious parties more closely identified with Iran. The theory that a democratic Iraq would inevitably fall under the orbit of the radical Mullahs in Qom has taken another blow.
Iraqi Shiites in particular seemed to favor a strong central government in Baghdad, rather than a splintered nation of the kind favored only a couple years ago by sectarian politicians
All this amounts to a huge strategic gift to the Obama Administration. Iraq now stands as a democratic and pluralistic model for other Arab states, and as proof that Iranian-style theocracy isn’t in the Shiite political DNA. If the “smart power” that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton likes to talk about has any meaning, it’s to capitalize on developments like these.