Reply #359: Robert Fisk: Triumph and Tragedy for Iraq

[Jack Rabbit]

From the London Independent via TruthOut
Dated Monday January 31

Triumph and Tragedy for Iraq
By Robert Fisk

Baghdad - Even as the explosions thundered over Baghdad, they came in their hundreds, and then in their thousands. Entire families, crippled old men supported by their sons, children beside them, babies in the arms of their mothers.

The Shi'ite Muslims of Baghdad yesterday walked quietly to polling stations, to the Martyr Mohamed Bakr Hakim School in Jadriya, without talking, through the car-less streets, the air pressure changing around them as mortars rained down on the US and British embassy compounds and the first of the day's suicide bombers immolated himself and his victims, most of them Shi'ites, 3km away.

The Kurds voted, in their tens of thousands, but the Sunnis - 20% of Iraq's population, whose insurgency was the principal reason for this election - boycotted or were intimidated from the polling stations.

The turnout figure, estimated at perhaps 72% of Iraq's 15-million registered voters, represented both victory and tragedy. For while the Shi'ites voted in their millions with immense courage, the Sunni voice remained silent, casting into semi-illegitimacy the National Assembly whose existence is supposed to provide the US with a political excuse to extricate itself from its little Vietnam in the Middle East.

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