Politics & Power Quote by Zalmay Khalilzad

Confidence is doing a lot of work here. Khalilzad, speaking as a diplomat in the Iraq War era, isn’t merely praising democratic procedure; he’s trying to manufacture legitimacy in real time. “It is important” signals the careful, non-accusatory language of someone who can’t openly concede how contested the ground is. The sentence aims less at Iraqi voters than at multiple audiences watching the same election: Iraqi factions poised to dispute outcomes, international partners needing a narrative of progress, and domestic publics in the U.S. and elsewhere asking whether the intervention produced something that looks like accountable government.

The subtext is that suspicion is already baked in. If you have to stress that vote counting must be “free and fair,” you’re acknowledging the opposite possibility without naming culprits. Khalilzad threads the needle by emphasizing process (“including the process for vote counting”) rather than winners, a subtle attempt to shift political conflict away from sectarian or partisan claims and toward technocratic credibility. That focus on counting is revealing: in fragile post-conflict elections, the count is where rumors metastasize and where power brokers apply pressure.

Context matters because elections in occupied or heavily externally influenced settings carry an extra burden: even a clean ballot can feel compromised if the broader sovereignty question is unresolved. Khalilzad’s line is a preemptive inoculation against the charge that the result is imposed, not chosen. It’s diplomacy as narrative control: stabilize the story of democracy before the numbers arrive, so the outcome, whatever it is, can be defended as the product of procedure rather than force.