TOO GOOD FOR THE TIMES:

For a Battered Populace, a Day of Civic Passion (JOHN F. BURNS, 1/31/05, NY Times)

Nobody among the hundreds of voters thronging one Baghdad polling station on Sunday could remember anything remotely like it, not even those old enough to have taken part in Iraq's last partly free elections more than 50 years ago, before the assassination of King Faisal II began a spiraling descent into tyranny.

The scene was suffused with the sense of civic spirit that has seemed, so often in America's 22 months here, like a missing link in the plan to build democracy in Iraq. Gone, for this day at least, was the suspicion that 24 years of bludgeoning under Saddam Hussein had bred a disabling passivity among the country's 28 million people, an unwillingness, among many, to become committed partners in fashioning their own freedoms.

At the Darari primary school, east of the Tigris River in central Baghdad, the courtyard teemed with people of all ages, and of all ethnic and religious groups, doing what American military commanders here have urged for so long: standing up for themselves, and laying down a marker, with their votes, that signaled they could not be intimidated into surrendering their rights by the insurgents who have terrorized the country with guns and bombs and butchers' knives.

The voters were the same people, mostly, who crowded polling centers in the fall of 2002, six months before American troops toppled Mr. Hussein, to re-elect him in a one-candidate referendum by an official vote count of 100 percent. Then, all was uniformity, and cries of fealty to the dictator.

On Sunday, everything about the voting resonated with a passion for self-expression, individuals set on their own choices, prepared to walk long distances through streets choked with military checkpoints, and to stand for hours in line to cast their ballots.

"A hundred names on the ballot are better than one, because it means that we are free," said Fadila Saleh, a 37-year-old engineer, as she hurried about the courtyard trying to find an official who would allow her to transfer her vote to the Darari center, setting aside a mistaken register that had her living miles away. Eventually, she prevailed, along with several friends dressed like her in the head-to-toe cloaks of conservative Muslim women.

Because so much of the media is anti-American/anti-war/anti-Iraqi/anti-whatever it's almost as if Mr. Burns, who's made no bones about being glad Saddam is gone, has a conflict of interest.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2005 1:43 PM