The last time Iraqis went to the polls for national parliamentary elections, in 2005, the insurgency against the U.S. invasion of 2003 was still gaining strength, Sunni Arabs who had benefited under former President Saddam Hussein's dictatorship boycotted the vote in protest, and the emergence of a Shiite-dominated coalition led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki - then newly elected - brought the deeply divided country to the brink of civil war.
Before Iraq's second national election, which was held over the weekend, many observers feared a repeat of the turmoil in 2005 amid insurgent threats to again use violence to disrupt the process. But at a time when Iraq has largely faded from U.S. headlines - a big exception being Sunday night's Best Picture win for the Iraq war film "The Hurt Locker" - the country appears to be moving away from the sectarian violence of five years ago and toward the establishment of a true democracy.
To be sure, insurgents tried to frighten Iraqis away from voting with a barrage of rocket and mortar fire that began even before the polls opened on Sunday. The violence killed some 30 people and wounded three times as many. The worst incident occurred when insurgents detonated a large cache of explosives hidden in an apartment near a polling station in Baghdad, causing the structure to collapse with 26 people inside.
But this time, Iraq's citizens, including large numbers of Sunni Arabs, refused to be intimidated. By the end of the day, the violence had faded and overall turnout was surprisingly high - 55 percent to 60 percent, according to early estimates. That's better than most U.S. presidential elections.
The Iraqis' insistence on their right to vote - and the relative ineffectiveness of insurgent violence in deterring them - is a testament both to the performance of Iraqi security forces in their first major test since American troops withdrew from the nation's urban areas and to the maturation of an Iraqi democracy in which people increasingly feel they have a stake in the outcome of elections. Early reports indicate that, although flawed in places, the process was generally fair, and U.N. observers said they saw few signs of voting irregularities like those that cast last year's elections in Afghanistan into doubt.
