Quote:
Originally posted by Gattigap
Yes, but how will we know? If there's significant bloodshed in Sunni areas, it may not be clear whether people wanted to go but couldn't, or if they stayed home and cheered. The situation may be cloudy enough that it'll be difficult to tell where to place our disdain.
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I agree. My neat division depends on being able to tell the difference. My fear is that some Sunni cleric issues a fatwah, hordes of Sunnis don't vote, and they claim that they don't dare out of fear, and we're left with the question of, centrality of boycott or fear? But that still, in my mind, distills the issue - if we can find some way to determine this question, we will know the validity of the election. It's not a matter of generally just claiming there might be problems, and so we can't do it this way - the problem is defined. That's closer to democracy than Iraq was last year.
(ETA - My hope would be a result so one-sided that, even if all of the people who didn't vote for whatever reason had voted for one particular Sunni candidate, that candidate still would have lost. Such a no-harm-no-foul outcome would be, in my mind, a very defensible result.)
