Oh, Charles Krauthammer! There's so much magical thinking in this lede that one wonders if you plagiarized the end of a rainbow!
Preoccupied as it was poring through Tom Daschle's tax returns, Washington hardly noticed a near-miracle abroad. Iraq held provincial elections. There was no Election Day violence. Security was handled by Iraqi forces with little U.S. involvement. A fabulous bazaar of 14,400 candidates representing 400 parties participated, yielding results highly favorable to both Iraq and the United States.
A miraculous absence of violence? Not so!
KIRK, Iraq - Six policemen and a civilian were wounded in a bomb attack in a town north of Baghdad on Saturday as the nation was voting in provincial elections, police said.
The attack took place in the main street of Tuz Khurmatu, where on Wednesday two police guarding a school being used as a polling station were gunned down.
And still Faris Taha, one of the election's victors, according to preliminary results, is too fearful to return to the region he will soon represent.
"I cannot go back," he said, having retreated from his hometown east of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, to a hotel in Baghdad's Green Zone. "I am afraid."
Yielding favorable results? Unless the goal was to yield a fresh round of inter-sectarian tension, that's looking like a naive overestimation:
Tallies are still unofficial in the Iraqi provincial elections, but from the perspective of Sunni participation in the political process -- one of the biggest imbalances in Iraqi politics that the elections were supposed to redress -- it's looking increasingly grim.
First we've got the combustible mixture of acrimony, fraud accusations and lack of acceptance of legitimacy in Anbar province, where it appears the former insurgents and tribesmen who formed the Anbar Awakening didn't get the electoral victory they expected....Going off the newspaper Aswat al-Iraq's tally, the Sunnis appear to have gone from one seat out of 57 to ten or eleven. One of the reasons for this: Shiite death squads have spent years cleansing Baghdad of Sunnis through intimidation and violence; and the Sunnis who used to live in Baghdad couldn't vote there...combine that with the unexpectedly strong showing of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's party in Baghdad province, and it's not hard to see Sunnis asking themselves: what did political participation get us?
So, yeah. A "near" miracle. Missed it by that much.