While remembering the brutal loss of life surrounding Sunday's landmark Iraqi elections, commentators from the mainstream Arab media praised the process as a magnificent lesson to Arabs in general and dismissed gloomy projections that a Sunni-Shiite conflict would emerge.

"For the first time," columnist Sayyar Jamil wrote in Lebanon's independent An Nahar daily on Thursday, the Iraqis "have soared in the skies like birds that were jailed in their cages for ages." He said the vote would prove a valuable and unforgettable lesson outside Iraq.
"It shall remain as a badge of distinction on the road of transformations that I hope the Arabs will benefit from in renewing themselves," he wrote. The Iraqis have proved their "political pluck and prowess" and have begun a "historic undertaking under very difficult circumstances."

Several newspapers in Egypt, however, offered critical and glum commentaries. The semiofficial Al Ahram wrote that a Shiite Arab country would emerge, subjecting Iraq to new divisions and separatist movements. Salama Ahmad Salama opined that the goal of the elections was to carry out the U.S. will and preempt an escalating mood of chaos that was threatening to push Iraqi Shiites into an alliance with the Sunni insurgents. Salama wrote that Iraqi voters did not know the identities of the candidates or the procedures and that international monitors hid in their hotel rooms. "The Iraqis became like someone looking for a black cat in a dark room," Salama wrote.

The Palestinian Al Ayyam newspaper carried gallows humor caricatures, with one featuring a skeleton gripping a ballot box and another showing an Iraqi in a cowboy hat holding up an index finger shaped like a well spewing oil.

Raghida Dergham, a columnist based in New York for Al Hayat, a paper published in London, disagreed. In a lengthy article Thursday headlined "Regional Politics: A Finger Dipped in Blood to a Finger Stained With Ink," Dergham wrote that Iraqis have warned foreign fighters that exploitation of the crisis in Iraq was forbidden. She also commented that Iraqis have signaled that election day was the "launching pad for an imperative popular mobilization against terrorism and the program of destruction adopted by al Qaeda and all its derivatives." Ink-stained index fingers have evoked "stunning jealousy among some Arabs and fears among others of the locomotive of change creeping into the region," Dergham wrote.

Dergham acknowledged that the elections were a victory for the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government and the Bush administration and had "dealt a blow to rebellion and extremism." But the grand winner was Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, she wrote, who by sheer force of character and style was able to draw a majority of Iraqi Shiites to the polls. The elections gave Sistani "important keys," she continued: He could either preserve the secular nature of Iraq or attempt to create a theocracy, as in neighboring Iran.

Columnist Jihad Khazen wrote Wednesday in Al Hayat: "We could love or hate America, but at the end of the day, elections were conducted freely, without any pressures, and in spite of all the terrorism." He quoted an Iraqi friend who told him over the telephone that he "felt for the very first time while voting that he was a free man." But the process still lacks credibility, Khazen qualified, because of a boycott by some Sunni voters and the atmosphere of terror that kept others from voting.

"There still are many ways for them to participate in governing the country and I do not predict religious Shiite rule, because everyone knows that would lead to a civil war," he said. Khazen anticipated that whatever friction ensued might end up more as rivalry between the Iraqi and the Iranian Shiite clergy.

"What I say as a caring observer on the outside is that I predict a kind of brotherly competition between Qom and Najaf," he wrote, referring to the Iranian and Iraqi holy cities, "more than a collaboration over the Sunnis, the Kurds or others."

Khazen said the elections probably marked the beginning of a U.S. "exit strategy" from Iraq, provided the Iraqis do not ask for a timetable for withdrawal. "And if that is true, the Iraqi government has no time to waste on Sunnis and Shiites or Kurds and a hundred parties competing for power. Its role is to work on consolidating security and stamping out terrorism. Everything else follows this mission."