Iraq_Connection: It's a different world in politics

The election results are in and I get to try to go to sleep to the sound of celebratory gunfire. I'll play tough and say, that's cool, I expected that.

I'm just not sticking my head out the window.

I'll pretend to be as unconcerned as the police officers who are still dealing with the car accident on Kirkuk Street, conveniently centered underneath the red tracers shooting into the sky (ok so I peaked out a little). My fixer assures me it's nothing; people are happy.

That's just one of the ways that Iraqi democracy bears little resemblance to the American kind.

I got a sense of that Friday when I sat in the office of a candidate for the upstart Change party, which took on the established government and appeared to win about a third of the seats in the Kurdish parliament.

Men in traditional Kurdish attire - pressed shirts, baggy pants with matching jackets and a wide sash around the hips - filed in to pledge their support for a candidate who had switched sides from the incumbents and joined the challengers.

They told the candidate they were giving up on the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan because those parties hadn't done enough to honor martyrs who had died at the hands of Saddam Hussein before the war. They wanted money, and they indirectly asked for it if the Change Party was victorious.

(There was an irony in the subtext: The candidate had been a powerful PUK leader who presumably had a role in deciding how to treat martyrs to the cause.)

They weren't the only voters whose main complaint against the government involved the incumbents not sharing Kurdish wealth.

Another man told me he was disappointed that the government wouldn't pay for his wife's medical bills in Jordan when she fell ill to a disease that claimed her life. Instead, the government paid for her funeral.

As I write this, I'm beginning to understand the American parallel. The complaints from the families of Saddam's victims are akin to the U.S. military abandoning veterans when they return home, or being stingy with cash in the event of a soldier's death.

The man who complained about health care has an obvious tie to our country's current debate over how to pay for medicine.

Maybe it's not as different as my first impression after all.

One more thing about the Change Party. It rode a wave of resentment to the incumbents, who most residents assume own a cut of just about every business in these provinces.

I visited the Change Party's headquarters. It doubles as the base of a multimedia empire that includes a television station, a newspaper and a printing press.

I don't want to be cynical because the voting I saw was free and full of healthy debate. I just couldn't help but hear Roger Daltry singing "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss," as we drove away from the Change compound in Sulaimaniya.

- AA