The Iraqi Vote

I wanted to comment on the Iraqi vote, but this by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post this morning sums up (better than I could have said it) what I have been thinking since Sunday.

Specifically, two observations from Cohen, capture my thoughts exactly:

Give people a chance to have some sort of say in their governance -- to make even a particle of difference in their own lives -- and they will seize it. This is particularly the case if voting is new to them -- a delight in a life that has offered few to none. It was, truly, one hell of a day.

And,

One part of democracy is easy to master: winning. It's losing that's hard. If the loss is total or feared to be -- not just some political post but your very way of life -- you might think that your only recourse is violence. If the Sunnis fear that their loss will be absolute, they will not join Iraq's emerging civil society -- and so far they apparently haven't. In that case, the insurgency will continue, tolerated if not supported by the Sunnis. Those willing to fight and die for the new Iraq will be Arab Shiites and ethnic Kurds -- and the latter only for their own corner of the world. This is a prescription for civil war.