Hopes for secular politics

Iranian writer Amir Taheri writes in the Times that “an election that was not supposed to happen because the so-called resistance in Iraq — and its sympathisers in the West — did not want it has produced results that the doomsters did not expect.” He believes that “the new assembly will be organised on the basis of political programmes rather than sectarian and/or ethnic identities with Arab nationalist, Islamists and liberals-conservatives blocs forming. But those who have known the new emerging Iraqi leadership for years know that almost all its members are united in their rejection of any new form of despotism. Having been liberated from Saddamism, few Iraqis would want to return to a state of virtual servitude, whether in the name of God or political ideology.”