ABSTRACT
The election of February 9, 1986, in the Philippines was an important one. Voters were offered the choice between retaining Ferdinand Marcos, who had held power in Manila for some two decades and whose regime was widely regarded as corrupt and self-serving, or replacing him with Corazon Aquino, the politically inexperienced widow of a former leader of the opposition to Marcos. Marcos’s victory claims set off what soon came to be known as the “People Power Revolution,” one in which flowers replaced bullets in the rifle barrels of the Philippine army as the people of the nation literally filled the streets, convincing the troops that the Marcos government had lost its legitimacy, and making any sort of military maneuvering impossible. The Iraqis learned a different but related lesson in the fall of 1988, as they attempted to refute charges that they were engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Kurds.
