Iraq election news... posted by Richard Seymour

Some interesting articles and links on the situation in Iraq today. The Iraqi blogger Shlonkom Bakazay derides the "draconian elections" and remarks that there are only five television cameras allowed to film what is happening at 6,000 polling booths. He also reveals that the Beeb is using Allawi's supplied translators who feed false translations of what an interviewee has just said.

Polling stations at a number of towns in Iraq were still not open five hours after voting was due to begin, according to the country's Electoral Commission, while the polls are set to close an hour early .

Predictably, the turnout among Sunnis is negligible, yet I am hearing whispers of a turnout of 72% nationally, which would be comfortably high. The source of the claims? Tex at Antiwar.blog has the answer: a single Iraqi election official. That official change his position after question, (click on the "72%" link above). Other estimates are more modest, positing a turnout of 50% or more , another report suggesting merely that it could "reach or exceed 50%" . That would hardly be miraculous, but certainly a stronger turnout than I would credit for such a transparently fraudulent, anarchic, unfair process.

I don't need to enlighten you about the spate of suicide bombings and rocket attacks that have marked this election. 44 have been killed. Despite the fixing, the injustice, the exclusion of so many voters and the death, the occupiers have hailed it as a "success" . Frankly, if two Iraqis had made it there to vote only to perish in a mortar attack on the way out, they would still find a way to call it a success.

And Juan Cole has some excellent analysis :

1) "[T]his process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan."

2) "[T]he Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005."

Exactly right, in two shots. The elections were extremely flawed, but even insofar as they do reflect what Iraqis want, that is a victory of Iraqis themselves against the coalition.

Incidentally, there are some right-wing US commentators who are rather unhappy that votes are being counted at all:

CARLSON: Listen, we can't leave We can't stay. It's a terrible situation to be in, and we're going to end up -- listen, in secret meetings at the White House, they're no longer talking about democracy flowering in the Middle East and a bastion for others to follow, they're saying, How are we going to get out of this with honor?

...

You know if our post-war policy had been a little better, Iraqis wouldn't have to be quite so brave to vote and we may end up supporting with our own soldiers a theocracy or a semi- theocracy that the Reagan-Bush people armed Saddam Hussein to prevent. That's the irony of all of this.