A new day has dawned

Iraq's constitutional referendum last week went better than anticipated, given the daily violence in the areas of the country dominated by the Sunni majority. Unofficial results indicate Iraqis voted heavily in favour of adopting the new constitution.

The results of last January's election are vindicated as Iraqis now prepare for parliamentary elections scheduled for Dec. 15, and the making of a new government for a free and democratic Iraq.

Last month in this space, I predicted a favourable outcome for the Oct. 15 vote. The reasoning was simple.

I suggested since half the voting population are women they would vote massively in support of the draft constitution, hoping to secure for themselves and their children a better future.

A better future for Iraq and the Arab-Muslim world will most definitely be determined only by the extent to which Muslim women acquire their rights to be free and equal.

Four days after the referendum, the world and, most importantly, Iraqis, watched Saddam Hussein appear in the prisoner's dock as the first of many charges against him were read out in court. The sight of the tyrant facing a special tribunal arranged to prosecute him and senior members of his regime is a political earthquake whose tremors will resonate for a long time across the Middle East.

Never before -- anywhere in the Arab world -- has a population participated freely and willingly in the shaping of its government as Iraqis are doing -- despite the tremendous violence directed against them by bloody-minded insurgents. Never, in the 1,400 years of Islam, has an Arab-Muslim despot been brought into a court of justice to answer for crimes of rape, torture and murder of people under him.

This is a uniquely riveting moment in Arab-Muslim history, and everyone in the region is mesmerized by the events occurring in Iraq.

But none of this could have been imagined without regime change in Baghdad. The midwife of a new Arab politics is, without any quibble, U.S. President George Bush.

It needs repeating that without Bush's decision for regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the sacrifices of U.S. and coalition soldiers, more than 50 million Muslims would not have been liberated.

The domino effect of freedom in the heart of the Muslim world is already visible in the region. We are seeing a reluctant acknowledgment by autocrats of opening societies to greater participation by their citizens as Iraqis, with American support, build an Arab model of democratic government to which others may aspire.

But then there is the Paris-Berlin axis, whose politicians and opinion-makers remain alert to denigrate the sacrifices of others in expanding liberty's frontiers. France is also the pontificating power that, when confronted with demands for freedom in its colonies, bore down with heavy hands upon the colonized (e.g., in Algeria).

There is also the mainstream lib-left media in North America whose instincts are to bury or tear down anyone or anything that has a whiff of nobility or goodness in it.

Moreover, in the realm of blinkered thinking and political fiction inhabited by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore and their supporters, America has never done any good, and any faults of the likes of Saddam, Fidel Castro or Robert Mugabe can readily be attributed to some "root causes" originating in the perfidy of Anglo-American imperialism.

History would be incomplete without such irony. And Iraqis, in moving forward, will discover freedom brings new risks and responsibilities as some among them stumble out of weakness or ingratitude.

This is a very encouraging article. I hope that the writer Salim Mansur is right and democracy takes root in Iraq and other arab states.

The minority sunni's continue to be a threat to coalition forces and an obstacle to pacification and Iraqi national security. The options for dealing with them apparently are: (1) Continue to tolerate their subhuman behavior and hope to eventually win them over to the side of democracy, or (2) basically annihilate them ASAP and save as many lies as possible among coalition forces and innocent iraqi's. It seems as though we are persuing option (1)

It seems like George W. Bush has once again made his vision become reality. A free and constitutionally based representative elective republic has been born of the ashes of one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East.

True, the cost in lives, both Iraqi and those of the coalition forces that toppled Saddam Hussein, and in treasure, has been a burden, and as some may say, perhaps a very high price. But consider the alternative - the world still held hostage to the whims of a person of uncertain sanity or stability, and the internal repression of a population unable to change its condition to which it had been condemned by circumstances far beyond their control. Plus a number of surrounding regions complacent in their assurance that no serious challenge to their reactionary ways would ever by mounted by the decadent Westerners.

Squads of bearded men with burning eyes seemed able to strike without retaliation anywhere they wanted in the world, and as they were without fear of death, and even thought such an end to be a glorious thing, They could make a vast penetration before those decadent Westerners could respond. Westerners, and particularly Americans, feared death or injury so greatly, they would never respond in any meaningful way. But precisely because we HAVE "seized the nettle", and crushed it in our grip, the threat has diminished, almost to the vanishing point.

For those of you who do not understand the reference to nettles, there is a weed known as "stinging nettle", the mere brush against its leaves leaves a red welt across the skin. But if the nettle is crushed, the tiny spines are destroyed, and the irritant does not penetrate the outer layer of the skin. At that point, the leaves may be chewed, or dried and brewed into a form of tea. The dead plant, left to dry out in the pasture, makes winter forage which may be safely consumed by livestock, and in fact, is rather high in crude plant protein.

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