Silicon Valley Redneck

Once more unto the polls, dear friends, once more!

According to the clock/calendar applet, it's a bit after 7 PM in Baghdad; according to the news reports, the Iraqis have held another successful election: huge turnout, little violence, and the outcome won't be known until the ballots are counted (important detail, that).
Mainstream news reports here and here (among many others).  For local coverage, there's a huge, multi-reporter story over at ITM.

Looks like the opposition has caught on to the idea that the elected government is really going to be the new power, and that they should claim their fair share of representation... and perhaps also that the way you get rid of Americans is to vote in a government that'll ask them to leave.  The enemy presumably knows this too, and is agin it, but doesn't seem to have all that much influence anymore.

(No, I didn't stain my finger in solidarity with the voters.  The only people who should be showing off their purple fingers today are Iraqis who voted.  How would you like it if, on our election day, a buncha furriners went around wearing red-white-and-blue, starry-and-stripey, "I VOTED" stickers? (The finger at top left doesn't count; it's not a people but an icon.))

Ho hum, the Iraqis are voting again.

Well, it seems the big referendum in Iraq was a success.
It'll be a while yet before we find out whether the new constitution was accepted or turned down, but that's a fiddly detail: reasonable and well-informed people voted different ways; it's not like there's one side that's clearly right and one that's clearly wrong.
Actually, there is one side that's clearly wrong, and that's the side that lost big yesterday.  There were three sides in the referendum: "vote YES", "vote NO", and "stay home and don't vote or we'll kill you".  The third faction succeeded in tying up a lot of resources, but completely failed to make large number of voters stay home, though some (like Truth Teller, who voted NO) were considerably inconvenienced by the security measures.

Over in the comments section at ITM (Omar, by the way, voted YES), Andrea links to a collection of photos of the voting.

Despte anything the silly news commentators may have said, if the heavy turnout in the NO-leaning governorates leads to the current draft constitution being rejected, that won't be a "setback for democracy."  It'll be a triumph of democracy.  The whole point of a legitimate referendum is that the people do have a right to vote NO.  If it's voted down, the new Assembly (to be elected) will just have to go back and try again, and try to get it right this time.  If the hordes of NO-voters show up for the Assembly election, they'll have their fair share of representation when the next draft is written.

Personally, without regard to the merits of the current draft constitution, I wouldn't blame anyone for voting against it just for the way the revisions and referendum were handled.  With the after-the-last-minute revisions, the voters were basically being asked to approve a pig in a poke (OK, so a sheep in a sack), and it seems that one of the late revisions means the whole thing is basically set in Jello anyway (allowing amendments immediately by a simple majority vote of the Assembly), which would make the whole "constitution" thing rather pointless - a proper constitution should be simple, durable, and difficult to amend (i.e., more like the US than like California).

Anyway, there was a big turnout and little violence, which points to the opposition turning to politics - a Good Sign.  Assuming that the vote count is seen to be honest, we can hope that most Iraqis will continue to take their political system seriously, thereby further undercutting those who would (re)gain power by force.
Then maybe the neighbors will start Getting Ideas.  Dominos, anyone?

Update: Varifrank is more eloquent.

Success!

Good news from Lebanon: the election has been formally called, on schedule.  The protesters can now fold up their tents and return to their lives.
Michael Totten has one last report from Beirut.

Spirit of America has a new project

Spirit of America has recently launched a project to support the Lebanese independence and democracy movement.  I just sent some money their way; have a look here, here, and here, and see if you feel like doing likewise.

Interesting times in Lebanon!

Once again, the decent folks of Lebanon are flooding the streets, waving flags, and generally putting on a good impression of a respectable mass movement.
Estimates of the crowd are running from 800,000 to more than twice that.  That's on the order of a quarter to half of the population!

There's much more over at Publius and National Review.

A total and hasty Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could prove inconvenient to Assad in many ways... one of which is bolstered by the recent report that Saddam's secret-weapon programs had, as the VRWC had been saying all along, been systematically dismantled and the materiel taken elsewhere ("Honest, he used to have that stuff!  Clinton was right!").  Fingers have often been pointed at Syria, but, when the pointing gets specific, the usual suspected location has been the Bekaa Valley.  "No, those weapons aren't in Syria!  Not at all!  They're, um, next door.  In that little country we've been occupying for 30 years. Nothing to do with us!"

Meanwhile in Iraq, crowds have taken to the streets to protest  a recent suicide bombing perpetrated by a Jordanian.  Publius has more on this, and points to further detail from Natasha Tynes.

Update to the meanwhile: apparently the bomber wasn't a Jordanian after all; the Jordanian newspaper article that touched off the protests was garbled - Natasha has the followup.

Update on the stuff that might be in the Bekaa Valley: here's the original NYT article, and here Christopher Hitchins looks at the implications.

The Flying Purple Finger of Freedom is on the loose!

The Flying Purple Finger of Freedom is running amok this week!  Clicking a few links from Instapundit, we find a roundup at Publius Pundit, covering Kuwaiti suffragettes, Egyptians concerned that the upcoming election will be rigged, and  rallies in Bolivia, Nepal, Morocco, Pakistan... and the reappearance of organized protests in China.  Gateway Pundit and Registan both cover the protests in Kyrgyzstan, one of those obscure and impoverished little central-Asian former Soviet republics you'd never think of as a hotbed of democracy.  Gateway Pundit also relays reports of protests in Iran; via Publius, here's more on that over at Regime Change Iran.
Living in interesting times, indeed!

Purple pride

The polls have closed... from the reports so far, it sounds like turnout was heavy in most areas, though, alas, light in the trouble spots. (Did anyone really expect a lot of voting in Fallujah or Tikrit?)
Terrorist attacks killed, by the highest estimate I've seen so far, about four dozen people, including eight terrorists.  Bad, but hardly the bloodbath that was threatened.
Contrary to the expectations of pundits, voters didn't immediately don gloves to cover their ink-stained fingers.  Rather, the purple index finger is proudly displayed in solidarity with the rest of the voters, and in defiance of the terrorists.
It wasn't just a bunch of pro-American cheerleaders voting, either. There were reports of people who had decided to vote because they'd gotten the message that that's the way you get rid of American occupiers: elect a government that will ask them to leave.

We won't know the results for a while yet; all those ballots need to be counted, and the Iraqis don't have modern conveniences like exit polls to give instant wrong results.  In a sense, though, it doesn't matter that much which list people voted for.
All the lists on the ballot had one important thing in common:
They were on the ballot.
This means that, however the representation on the National Assembly is distributed as a result of the vote, it will be distributed among those who got there by persuading people to vote for them, not by force.

Speculation has the Communists doing quite well, but don't be alarmed: the Iraqi Communist Party is completely out of step with the rest of the world's Communists, and can be expected to be a good influence in the government.

Firsthand reports from the cheerleaders: Mohammed and Omar, Alaa, Ali, Husayn, and Hammorabi.

Also: Christopher Albritton, and roundups at PoliBlog and Chrenkoff.  Further commentary at Cold Fury.

Ongoing coverage at The Command Post.

Overall, it looks like good news.  While the Iraqis are experimenting with election-night parties, it's time for me to grab some breakfast, and head for the hills - looks like hiking weather out there!

Update: big roundup at Instapundit.

Also, this:

Iconic, isn't it?

Some insights

Ibn Alrafidain offers some insights into the state of Iraqi society, and how it got that way.  No simple summary; go read it.

Meanwhile, Ali contemplates Islam and democracy.  Surprise!  The paid professional pundits have been asking the wrong question.

A proper leftist party platform

Via Harry's Place comes the platform of the Program of People's Unity Electoral List (the Iraqi Communist Party and friends).
Remember when leftists used to believe in this stuff?  When did "the Left" stop believing?