In a week I will either look very smart or very foolish, but I’m going to go ahead and venture a prediction: the Iraqi elections will be an Earth-shattering success. They’re going to prove all of the nay-sayers absolutely wrong. By the end of next week, I think, we’ll have seen, in the matter of months, free elections take place in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq.

If there was any single moment where I became convinced that the Iraqi elections would be a success, it was while watching the various election commercials now being broadcast in Iraq. One of them in particular features a single Iraqi stepping forward into an ally, only to be confronted by three insurgents. He stops. A man and a woman then step forward. The woman, seeing the terrorists, grabs the man’s arm and instinctively steps back. There’s a pause. Then more men and women step forward. They move in such numbers that the insurgents, recognizing that overwhelming strength of the people, decide to step away.

Ultimately, the sheer mass of the Iraqi people will expose the fraudulency of the insurgency. A few hundred men playing with bombs, a few hundred killers, and a few thousand wannabes dressed up in black are not an army. They are not the voice of the people.

The elections will choose a new government. Iraq will be free.

While I have various reasons for venturing this prediction, one is particularly central to my thinking: the media conventional wisdom says that the elections will be a disaster and, in the end, the conventional wisdom among the mainstream media is wrong roughly 99% of the time. If the media things something is going to go wrong, everything will probably be fine. If the media things something is wonderful that usually means it’s on the verge of disaster.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the individual concerns about the election.

First, there’s the worry that the election will result in the creation of an Iranian-style theocracy. The media would particularly enjoy this outcome for its irony. The problem is thus: it’s not going to happen.

The whole “elect-a-theocracy” concern, the “Algeria option” for lack of a better word, is born out of a complete misread of the Iraqi political situation. To begin because Shiites only make up 60% of the population they’d have to be absolutely united behind a single faction in order to make such an outcome possible. The only problem is: they’re not.

There are three main Shiite candidate lists heading into the election;

One, led by Prime Minister Allawi, is basically secular and Western-oriented. If they win, we’ve no worries at all in this regard.

Another, endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani, is led by a former nuclear scientist who fled into Iran after being persecuted by Saddam but who also abandoned Iran for Britain after finding the Mullahs to be as oppressive as Hussein. He hardly sounds like a would-be theocrat.

The third, the most obvious candidate to play the villain, is named the “Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.” They too, however, have proved to be cooperative with the United States and, indeed, were supportive of the US invasion.

It’s true that the SCIRI has extensive ties to Iran, but they’re just one faction among many. Given that the elections are being conducted by proportional representation, it’s highly unlikely that any faction will win a majority. Whatever government emerges is going to be a coalition.

Others have expressed concern that low Sunni turnout will put the nation under total Shiite control. This remains a valid concern. However, I expect that the Sunni turnout will be much higher than expected. In large measure, I think that the reports of “Sunni problems” are the result of an obvious tendency on the part of the Western media to view foreign tribes and religious blocs and absolutely monolithic and to report on them as though they were. There will be some areas where insurgents manage to disrupt voting by the Sunnis but, for the most part, I expect Sunni turnout to greatly exceed expectations.

Violence is, of course, a concern. But, from all appearances, the capabilities of the terrorists in Iraq extend only so far. They might be able to kill a few hundred people, at the most. But I doubt if that will be enough to stop the election.

That may sound cold but, remember, this is a part of the world where hundreds of people are routinely killed during religious pilgrimages. A few hundred dead is, I think, hardly too high a price to pay for freedom. Iraqis aren’t like Westerners. They’re acclimatized to terror and they’re better able to resist it.

In fact, given the security measures to be taken, one wonders if the insurgents will be able to meaningfully increase (or even maintain) their pace of attacks during the election.

This election will be an important step in the implementation of the Freedom Doctrine that President Bush propounded during his Inaugural Address. People want to live in freedom and they’ll stand together to get it. Free governments, even those we don’t like, are preferable to tyranny.

I have a second prediction as well: as soon as the elections are successful, every columnist who predicted doom will be mining their own work to prove that what happened was what they’d advocated all along.