Demagogue

The New York Times reports:

Iraqi election officials today released partial returns from Sunday's election that gave the main Shiite group, the United Iraqi Alliance, a commanding lead in the balloting.

Of the 1.6 million votes counted, the Shiite Alliance took approximately 75 percent, according to a provisional breakdown by The New York Times of partial results ... the coalition group founded by the interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, known as Iraqi List, was in second place with 19 percent.

... election commission officials cautioned political analysts about making projections. But with Shiites accounting for 60 percent of Iraq's population, and with a turnout of as much as 80 percent in the main Shiite population centers in the South, it appeared increasingly likely that the main Shiite alliance would emerge as the overwhelming winner.

... [The Alliance] entered the election claiming the patronage of Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Thinking back to yesterday's post by Arnold, dare I remind us that this is the vision of democracy that al-Sistani's Alliance has in store for Iraq:

[The Shiite coalition] will seek to implement religious law in the place of civil law for matters of personal status, and possibly in other realms ... Muslim fundamentalists throughout the world have adopted as one of their main political goals the repeal of civil laws ... replac[ing] them with a rigid and often medieval interpretation of Islamic law.

This form of Islamic law ... would typically deny divorced women any inheritance, give girls half the inheritance received by their brothers, restrict women's right to initiate divorce, restrict women's appearance in public, and make the testimony of women in court worth half that of a man ... Grand Ayatollah Sistani [has] already telegraphed [his] desire for this change.