Watching Iraqis lining up to vote on Thursday, I had a familiar feeling. It took a while to pin it down.

The other part of my life – the part that’s not involved with newspapers – is largely spent in the company of children and horses. I do my best thinking out at the barn, doing the morning chores and, looking at my daughter’s spotted pony, I realized where that Iraqi-election feeling came from.

Chevy is that rarest of creatures – a safe, sane children’s pony. For many years I’ve been part of a youth equestrian organization. Think of me as a den mother for young riders. Over the years, I’ve learned to anticipate the kinds of problems that come up when you combine kids, parents, and 1,000-pound animals.

One of the classic scenarios we run into – and one of the scariest – happens when you combine a horse-crazy kid with inexperienced parents who decide to buy a pony and don’t understand what they’re getting into. Too often, the child goes online and finds, on one of the many Web sites devoted to horse sales, an adorable creature that calls out to her. “Suitable for beginners” the ad reads.

The parents yield to the child’s pleas. They decide to go and look at the pony – a fatal mistake, because you know what’s going to happen. The child is going to fall in love, and the parents are going to buy it.

The parents will have missed the warning signs, from the creature’s age to the owner’s haste in making the sale. It’s probably too young and silly (aged ponies are safer). It may be very cute but not well trained, even spoiled, liable to engage in dangerous behavior when asked to work. The seller may have ridden it to exhaustion before the family showed up, making it uncharacteristically docile when the child tried it out. It could even have been drugged. At the very least, it will not be happy to put up with the inevitable mistakes of a young rider – the wonky balance, the unscripted yanks on the reins, the mixed signals.

So … the child turns up at her first clinic, proud new owner with gorgeous new pony. And the pony clatters off the trailer, wheels on its haunches, rips the lead rope out of her hands and heads down the driveway. Or, once mounted, rolls its eyes, pins its ears, plants its front feet and tosses the poor kid into the dust.

That’s when you have to have The Conversation – the awful one in which you inform the parents that, although the pony looks like a movie star, it’s actually a dud and not safe for the child. The child then tearfully begs the parents not to sell poor little Misty, who was just having a bad day, and can’t we please try to make this work? You sigh. You recommend a trainer, or an older child who may be able to whip Misty into shape. You go home and pray.

Several things can happen. Too often the child turns up at the next clinic on foot with an appendage in a plaster cast. The family has bought a very expensive pasture ornament that eats a lot and is utterly useless, while the child, after several frightening experiences, loses heart. It’s sad to watch.

Every now and then, however, it actually works out. The little rider is very gutsy and does not end up in the hospital but learns to fall and gets back on the pony day after day, eventually making it realize that bad behavior won’t be rewarded. It may take a year and a half, while her friends are advancing quickly on more appropriate mounts, but one day she shows up again with a reformed animal. What can you do but give her a hug and compliment her on her fortitude?

So – back to Iraq: the war that looks to me like a disaster, the attempt at democracy that seems doomed to fail. And there its citizens are, hopeful, lining up at the polling places, doing their best to make it work.

One part of me is saying, “No way. While they struggle to form a government, there will be more assassinations, more bombings, more embarrassing revelations about prisoner abuse and contractors’ misdeeds, more kidnappings, more confusion. There’s no tradition here of rational, civil society. Remember Haiti? We supposedly installed democracy and all we got was chaos.” In other words, that pony’s a disaster.

The other part is saying, “Please, let this work. Please let me be wrong.”

– Susanna Rodell is editorial-page editor of The Charleston Gazette. Her e-mail address is srodell@wvgazette.com.