Holiday celebrations are getting underway at Casa Felber West (we even have a lovely War on Christmas Tree, with ornaments supplied by MoveOn that depict secular liberal media steet gangs lynching Santa! Shh - please don’t tell decent Americans!), so blog entries might be briefer in the coming days.

But I do have to call your attention to one developing story. By voting last week, the Iraqi people sent a message.

Apparently, that message was to Iran. And the message was, “Hi! ”

It seems that the early election returns in Iraq point to a gigantic victory for Iran.

It was a vague fear that some people floated early on - what if the fledgling democracy in Iraq voted for a government that wasn’t secular, pan-Iraqi, or pro-America? This was a “silly question,” of course, a piece of idle speculation that only true America-haters would even bring up. Of course they’ll vote for a reasonable government once they’ve had a taste of freedom.

It didn’t even occur to anybody that a bloody insurgency, America’s current disfavor in the world, well-publicized abuse allegations, and a propaganda war that even our administration concedes that we are losing at the moment… well, it didn’t occur to many people that this sort of thing might have some influence on how the Iraqis actually vote. That freedom can taste like lots of things.

The focus has been on the fact of the vote. You won’t see anything in any of the President’s recent speeches that indicates that who is chosen to lead Iraq could possibly matter in the slightest. Voting makes them a Democracy, being a Democracy makes them Stable and Our Friends.

Except when it doesn’t. Then… not so much.

Funny, because here, when we Americans vote, we are told in no uncertain terms that the future of the country is at stake. Why, I think I even heard something about that during the last Presidential election. Here in the US, who gets voted for can mean who our allies will be and what our policy will be and whether or not we go to war and stuff.

Iraq’s different I guess, though.

If these early results do reflect the eventual tally, Iraq’s ruling coalition is going to be a bunch of religious Shi’ite lawmakers. You know, like they have in Iran. The Sunnis and Kurds seem to have picked their best mywayorthehighwayites as well, and secular, unified-Iraq folks like the vaudeville team of Chalabi and Allawi… are losing big time. The “don’t even think about it even though it might happen” possibility of a balkanized Iraq now looms a lot larger.

“Yes, getting a visa to work in Kurdistan from Shi’iraq is easy, but you really can’t travel to Trianglonia these days…”

Not that we’re in a position to say anything about it anymore. After touting the vote so highly, we can’t really say, “Yeah, but you guys voted wrong. You kinda sorta voted away the freedom and stability we were trying to give you…” We can’t say that. Freedom, in this case, tastes like chicken.