January 28, 2005

I was driving in my truck when the news of the fall of the Soviet Union reached me via my vehicle’s radio. My jaw, like so many others, dropped open and stayed there for a while. Few saw that coming.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, the idea of democracy coming to Mother Russia and bloody places like Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Chile, Argentina, South Africa and other backwaters of tyranny and despotism, was a ludicrous concept to many Americans on the screaming, wild-eyed left. Yet today, assorted forms of democracy are living and breathing there.

No one should be surprised that the likes of Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy want democracy to fail in Iraq. These hateful radicals are much more interested in solidifying their purchase on the tree of divisiveness by seeing President Bush’s Iraq policy collapse than they are in seeing a bunch of Arabs acquire freedom for the first time in Iraq’s painful history. When these professional, unrepentant hate mongers say they are pro-democracy and pro-freedom for Iraqis, they are lying, for if democracy and freedom take hold in Iraq, President Bush wins and the leftists lose.

The turnout for Sunday’s election will be larger than the naysayers hope and claim, and we will see more Sunnis voting than what the complicit media insists we will see. There will be great violence between now and Sunday, of course, which is typical of burgeoning democracies in the Third World. But the election will come off and for the first time in the history of the Arab world, democracy will have been born. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with the dictators and tyrants of the region, such as those in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria, because they know history tells of democracy spreading like a nasty rash. That’s why countries such as the aforementioned not only have no genuine interest in seeing a free Iraq, but are actually doing whatever they can get away with to foment terrorism there. Even Jordan’s supposedly enlightened and educated king is predicting disaster in Iraq if freedom takes hold. Funny how Kennedy, Kerry and their cowardly click say the same thing.

Is Sunday’s election a guarantee Iraq will remain a democracy? Of course not. No country is guaranteed democracy forever, as forms of government come and go, at least according to the history books. But there is hope, even though hope is a concept that makes the Boxer brigade cringe and fret.

And we must also consider our own history. Our birth was a gruesome mess, with battlefields far and wide scattered with the bodies of new Americans. But we believed and the dream came to pass. Robert Emerson Newman, my ancestor and the sexton of the Old North Church in Boston, was in cahoots with a local silversmith one evening during what would become known as the Revolutionary War. When he hung two lanterns in the church steeple, he knew full well that there would be a price to pay for his actions. But he did it anyway.

The Iraqis know, too, that there will be hell to pay. And despite the most fervent hopes for failure of Pelosi and party, the Iraqis will go to the polls and make history, just like the democracies before them.

Bob Newman