The last two American presidential elections should have taught us not to take too much for granted when it comes to election returns. It may in fact turn out that the election results are more modest than we think them to be now. If so, I doubt it would change the overall moral of this story, but you can be sure there are lots and lots of people looking for bad news to undermine the elections’ success and legitimacy. If that happens, Bush and those supporting democracy in Iraq should be very clear that we side with the voters. What I mean by this is more than we should be pro-democracy or that we should applaud those who voted. As I argued into today’s column, it’s important that we make those who voted the only legitimate voice of the Iraqi people. Consider, for example, the French resistance. There certainly was a French resistance. But it was hardly comprised of every able-bodied man and woman in France. De Gaulle did not command massive armies of “Free French” either. But the French –with the help of the allies — were able to make the resistance the sole legitimate voice of the “real” France — eventually (one could argue that Petain’s Vichy government had more success on this score during the war). This was not a majoritarian argument, it was an aspirational argument. Or consider what the liberal babyboomers have done with the 1960s. They’ve managed to claim that hippies, anti-war protestors and Woodstock attendees represented the “real sprirt” of that decade. This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. But their success in pulling-off this marketing is instructive. For America’s sake and for the sake of democracy in Iraq and the Middle East, we have to be very careful and committed to making these brave Iraqis the voice of the real Iraq.