The Iraqis go to the polls today to vote in what the LA Times calls, “a high-stakes election that could determine the course of the nation, and the success or failure of the U.S. effort to bring Western-style democracy to the Arab Middle East.”

I’m reminded of that passage in Saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks’ character says this, after half his platoon has been wiped out searching for the title character:

He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease, or invent a longer-lasting lightbulb.

I pray to God that this war will have been worth it — that the Iraqis make the most of their opportunity.

I’m also reminded of what Lincoln said at Gettysburg:

…[F]rom these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Iraqis vote today and I hope they do the right thing. But if what they grant is permission for the mullahs to sit in judgement of the Iraqi Constitution, if the mullahs put Allah above the Iraqi Constitution, then what they’ll have created is an Islamic Republic. And that is not the “government of the people” that we honor; that is not what we should have spent our blood and treasure on to create for them.

Let Sandra Day O’Connor have the last word:

At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish…

In short, I fear a state that assumes that religious authority is the highest authority, rather than the authority of the people.

Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

If that is what happens in Iraq, our efforts will have been in vain and the damage from this war will take a generation to undo.