Successful elections in Iraq

Is it too much to hope that this could be a turning point? Let's hope that, with an estimated 60% turnout, these elections will be as important to Iraq as the Orange revolution to Ukraine.

More questions: Is it just the filtering of Western reporters, or do most people now understand (and demand?) democracy? How does the PRC government present this to their people, who still lack the right to vote?

NYTimes: Far from taking away their instinct for asserting themselves, they seemed to be saying, the humiliations of tyranny had made them hungry for a chance to take a stand.

The point was made by another elderly Shiite, Hachim Shahir, 83, who said he had been a bricklayer for much of his life. Dressed for the occasion in a faded blue blazer, with only frayed ends of cotton where its buttons used to be, and a Bedouin's black-and-white checkered headdress, he said he could not say exactly what it was about Abdulaziz al-Hakim, the scion of a Shiite religious dynasty, that had made him vote for the United Iraqi Alliance. "How would I know?" he asked. "I cannot read or write."

But after a pause, he remembered, after all, what had drawn him to the polls, and kept him there for a long time after his two sons, men in their 50's, had urged him to quit the lengthy lines and go home. "Under Saddam we were a people who were lost", he said. "Before, we were not able to talk to officials; they were just punching you, and kicking you. But now, with elections, we'll have good officials. We will know them, and they will know us."