Most Iraqis say future looks brighter

Barbara Slavin wrote in USA Today More Iraqis believe their country is headed in the right direction and fewer think it's going wrong than at any time since the U.S. invasion two years ago, according to a new poll.

The survey of 1,967 Iraqis was conducted Feb. 27-March 5, after Iraq held its first free elections in half a century in January. According to the poll, 62% say the country is headed in the right direction and 23% say it is headed in the wrong direction. That is the widest spread recorded in seven polls by the group, says Stuart Krusell, IRI director of operations for Iraq. In September, 45% of Iraqis thought the country was headed in the wrong direction and 42% thought it was headed in the right direction. The IRI is a non-partisan, U.S. taxpayer-funded group that promotes democracy abroad. Pollsters did not survey three of Iraq's 18 provinces because of security and logistical concerns. Two of those omitted, Anbar and Ninevah, are predominantly Sunni Muslim. A third, Dahuk, is mostly Kurdish. Krusell said that even if those areas had been included and 100% had expressed negative views, the poll would still have shown that most Iraqis believe that the situation in their country is improving.

Blogger Cori Dauber has a great post about the New York Times and their quest to find bad news in Iraq no matter what the facts may be. I highly recommend it to everyone. You might also like her earlier post about how the NYT distorts things. And sure enough, here which distorts the results of this poll.

As blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh says Of course, not all is utopian in Iraq, but since optimism is a force multiplier, the poll and the results that it reports may be a harbinger of more good things to come.

GPR points out that on a day when Iraq held their first freely elected parliament in 50 years, news wire agencies felt the need to "balance" the coverage by running headlines such as the following: Iraq's New Assembly Opens Amid Explosions. This is a common tactic by the MSM, where positive news is almost always offset by bad news and can be viewed as an attempt by the MSM to portray themselves as "fair and balanced." But we have a hard time remembering the last time a headline reporting a suicide bomb was offset by mentioning a school opening or the restoration of a medical clinic. And he points out that TigerHawk puts into (historical) perspective the explosions that took place while Iraq's new assembly opened. I recommend you read everything Tigerhawk wrote, but the conclusion was If you are a Western supporter of Arab democracy, be reassured that the Iraqis are moving with astonishing speed by historical standards. If you Iraqi, you should know that the first parliamentarians of the oldest democracies on Earth met and legislated at risk for their own lives.

I am sure that there will be bumps in the road to Democracy, but I believe that the Iraqis are headed down that road.