The strength of Iraq's National Assembly vote was always understood to be in an Iraqi governments ability to close ranks and focus on saboteurs and invaders still active in the country, and not the election itself, but that hasn't stopped press agencies from monochromatic publications for everything terrorists have accomplished in the last thirty-six hours.
Fortunately, we know that the enemy can succeed only by disrupting and obstructing — and its record in the year after the crushing of Ba'athist and Khomeinist insurrections has been one of staggering failure. Reconstruction continues, and may accelerate. Iraqi armed forces are becoming more sophisticated by the week, the latest news of Iraqi Air Force pilots training to fly C-130 Hercules aircraft that the United States will no doubt soon donate. And as their ranks swell, Iraq security forces assume more and more responsibility. Jim Dunnigan reports that 12 of 18 provinces are under Iraqi control.
Dunnigan also points out the lasting impact American military training — exemplifying respect, duty and honor — is likely to achieve. (Another nail in the nail-riddled coffin of the argument for somehow having retained the Ba'athist army in April 2003 is the incredible difference in peformance between rank based on merit and duty to defend the weak, and rank based on blind loyalty and fear.) Equity can only solidify the integrity Iraqis have shown in spite of stumbles caused by their sordid history and difficult circumstances.
The power of that idea will inspire far beyond the military. Policemen are murdered waiting for pay, by an attack that wins elite media headlines? Their friends and relatives might be among the country's growing highway patrol, a force expected to be ten times its present size in eighteen months. The Near Eastern concept of "retribution," a cultural more not far removed from pre-Enlightenment Europe, is usually wielded by detractors as a wild card to support their theories of Iraq's inevitable democratic failure and lasting contempt for American liberators. One nose out of joint and the whole thing goes to hell, they say. But have these same backbenchers ever considered that earthy justice would be brought to gangs and terror cells? That Iraqis, unlike relativist Westerners, aren't asking "Why do they hate us?" of the terrorists but instead "How do we best beat the daylights out of them?"