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[sgtclub]

• Yesterday in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai was sworn in as that country's first democratically elected president.
  
  In Ukraine, the Kremlin-backed ruling party's attempt to steal the election for Viktor Yanukovych appears completely stymied by the peaceful Orange Revolution. At minimum, it seems likely that there will be a re-vote on December 26.
  
  In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.3 million Palestinians are registered to vote in the January 9 election of one of ten presidential candidates seeking to replace the marvelously dead Yasser Arafat. In Iraq, nearly 14 million Iraqis are registered to vote for one of 156 parties running in the January 30th election. As Bill Kristol has pointed out, commentators in the Arab world are starting to wonder aloud why the Arabs with the most significant voting rights are those under American or Israeli occupation.
  
  Would it be pollyannaish, at this point, to be tremendously optimistic about the march of democracy and freedom?

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7483