"Democracy...is not very good, but it's better than nothing."

TIKRIT, Iraq, Dec. 13 - Along the main boulevard here in Saddam Hussein's hometown, hundreds of campaign posters have flowered where insurgents once tossed homemade bombs at American troops.

The guerrilla war found fertile ground in Tikrit, and defiant Sunni Arabs boycotted the elections in January.

But turnout in the parliamentary elections on Thursday is expected to be high, reflecting the shift in attitude of many Sunni Arabs toward the American-engineered political process.

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By Tuesday afternoon, Iraqi police officers and soldiers had already taken up guard positions at the city's polling stations, some wearing black ski masks to hide their identities.

Zuhair Damen, the electoral official in charge at the Khansa Girls' School, said he expected at least 2,000 of 2,800 voters registered at the site to turn out Thursday.

As he began taping up posters with voting instructions, he summed up the ambivalent feelings that many Sunni Arabs here have about finally being drawn into the political process.

"Democracy is better than nothing," he said. "It's not very good, but it's better than nothing."

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http://nytimes.com/2005/12/14/international/middleeast/14tikrit.html?hp&ex=1134536400&en=d6fe53a0b350b3ef&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule -- and both commonly succeed, and are right.
-- H. L. Mencken


Peace.