This is a shockingly naive piece from VDH.
"strangely seem to rule out any such optimism for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' elected government in a similarly violence-prone region."
Equating the elected Iraqi government to the supposedly "elected" government of the Palestinians is to wholly denigrate the hard fought for, with US blood and treasure, free political process in Iraq.
Their was ONE candidate for the Palestinians. The elections were not free as they were in Iraq. There were no US soldiers or any independent force overseeing and enforcing free elections. Reports of violence and coercion were rife. Abbas himself is a terrorist. His party has two miltary wings of terrorists - Fatah and Al Aqsa.
One of the foremost voices for democratizing the ME as a means to stop terror is Natan Sharansky. He has declared the Palestinian election a fraud that will not bring democratic change:
"Sharansky added the Palestinian Authority election was not “truly free, free elections can only take place in societies in which people are free to express their opinions without fear. This is not the case in the Palestinian Authority.”
Other disturbing news has surfaced validating Sharansky’s election concerns. The Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported that Abbas gave at least $100,000 to wanted terrorists during the Palestinian Authority election campaign. The New York Sun reported that “one of the reasons none of the other candidates received much support is intimidation by the PA. ‘People are afraid to be seen even reading their campaign literature’ said one Palestinian; the message that the people have received from various leaders of the PA is that if they vote for a candidate other than Mr. Abbas, they will either lose jobs they already have in the PA or will not be hired by the PA in the future. (The PA is the largest employer in Judea, Samaria and Gaza).”
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza has alleged massive fraud. The independent human rights group petitioned the Palestinian courts to cancel the election results. They allege that thousands of people voted twice. The New York Sun reported that Palestinian Arab sources in the West Bank claimed that Fatah party activists were rounded up to vote in the afternoon and re-vote in the evening in order to obtain a large mandate for Abbas."
http://www.zoa.org/pressrel2005/20050111a.htm
"INDEED, WHILE ABBAS'S election as PA chairman last January is commonly mentioned in the same breath with the Iraqi elections and, now, the Lebanese struggle (as well as President Mubarak's -- as yet untested -- promise of genuine multicandidate elections next September), the party over Abbas's "election" was one Sharansky did not join. Telling the Jerusalem Post last January 10 that this election was not "truly free," he explained: "Free elections can only take place in societies in which people are free to express their opinions without fear. This is not the case in the Palestinian Authority....there was no other candidate [than Abbas]..."
He went on to say it was a "shame" that, as Post reporter Herb Keinon paraphrased him, "the world uses the same words for completely different types of processes in different governmental systems, thereby making moral equivalencies that don't exist." Sharansky added in his own words: "This election can be the beginning of the democratic process only if we don't have illusions that democracy is already there, and that all we have to do now is give them independence. If that is what we do, then we will find that we have given independence not to a democratic state, but to a terrorist state."
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17286
Sham elections do not bring democracy. They encourage represssion.