ANOTHER ARAB STATE, ANOTHER ELECTION:

UAE to Hold Elections to National Council (Arab News, 2 December 2005)

The United Arab Emirates yesterday announced partial elections to the Federal National Council (FNC). The announcement was made on the eve of the country’s national day and 13 months after the founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed ibn Sultan Al-Nahayan, passed away. [...]

The move comes amid growing American pressure on Arab countries to adopt democracy. [...]

Sheikh Khalifa said the move aimed at allowing wider participation of the citizens of the country in decision-making. “Through a gradual, organized course, we have decided to start activating the role of the FNC through electing half of its members through councils for each emirate and appointing the other half,’’ Sheikh Khalifa said.

“By doing this, we will embark on a march that culminates into more participation and interaction from all the citizen of the country,” he said.

Reality is what we make it.

MORE:
Yes, we have opened Pandora's box in Iraq - but freedom has sprung free (Gerard Baker, 12/02/05, Times of London)

[S]uccess in Iraq, intangible as it is, was never just going to be confined to the country itself. Look at the broader map of the Middle East.

In neighbouring Syria, another unlovely old regime is cornered. The push for freedom that began in Iraq is steadily wresting Lebanon away from its status as a fief of Damascus. The Syrian dictator is feeling the painful consequences of his attempt to halt the spread of liberty by the old fashioned method of assassination.

In Iran, the proximity to a liberated Iraq is alarming the theocratic thugs who run the country and energising their enemies in the rest of the population.

In Israel, the one people in the region for whom freedom is no novelty, will go to the polls early next year. It looks likely that they will give a new mandate to Ariel Sharon to pursue his unlikely mission of unilaterally settling with the Palestinians.

This, the same Sharon who has been demonised by the same critics of the Iraq war, especially in Europe, is breaking the mould, not only in his own nation, but in the region too. He will push ahead, it seems, with a bold strategy in the teeth of fierce irredentism from the Right, that could result in a Palestinian state on more than 90 per cent of the West Bank and the whole of Gaza, perhaps even with a part of Jerusalem as its capital.

This may not be a direct outcome of the Iraq war, but does anyone really think it would have been possible while Saddam Hussein was actively promoting Palestinian terrorism? The critics of the war were right to say three years ago that it represented the high-risk option. There’s no doubt, as they said at the time, that not invading would have been the safer option.But over time, repeatedly exercising the easy option rarely produces long-term stability. By repeatedly deferring difficult decisions, repeatedly seeking accommodations with an ever more unacceptable status quo, we make the ultimate crisis that much larger, its consequences that much more devastating. The fluid of all those easy decisions crusts eventually into a hard carapace that can only be cracked with explosive force.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2005 10:33 AM