Iraq’s parliamentary elections have just concluded, but the major political battles are about to begin. At stake is what kind of country Iraq will become. Will Iraq’s progress toward greater stability continue? Will it look east towards Tehran for support and encouragement, or to the United States and its fellow Arabs? The stakes are high, and no one can afford to remain uninterested while Iraq continues its dramatic political evolution.
The winners and losers have not been sorted out yet, but several things are clear. The first of these is that Iraq’s democracy is alive and well. Approximately 62 per cent of eligible Iraqis went to the polls, a somewhat smaller turnout than in 2005, but on a par with the number of Americans that participated in the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008. The few calls for electoral boycotts were ignored by the Iraqi population, including Sunni Arabs, some of whose leading politicians had been banned from participating by the shady machinations of Iraq’s Justice and Accountability Commission on the grounds of Baathist loyalties.
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