Iraq Elections a Disaster in the Making
by Juan Cole

Both Bush and Allawi affirmed on Thursday that elections would be held as promised. Donald Rumsfeld, whose uncontrollable mouth is sometimes useful insofar as he lets the truth slip, said that elections might not be possible in all the provinces. Allawi minimized the violence, saying that it was confined to three of Iraq's 18 provinces. This assertion is simply untrue, and is anyway misleading because Baghdad is one of the three Allawi had in mind! Could an election that excluded the capital, with at least five million inhabitants, be considered valid? Denis D. Gray of AP notes: "However, at least six provinces – Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Nineveh – have been the scene of significant attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi authorities in the past month. The only areas not plagued by bloodshed are the three northern provinces controlled by Kurds. The situation in many areas, however, is unknown since journalists' travel is restricted by security fears." [...] The situation is even worse than Gray allows. As recently as August, the British expended 100,000 rounds of ammunition in Maysan province at Amara, saying they had the most intense fighting since the Korean War! Likewise there was heavy fighting in Wasit (Kut) and Najaf. In the map below I made the present security-challenged provinces red, and those that saw recent heavy fighting are purple. I ask you if this looks like the problems are in "three of 18 provinces," or whether it looks to you like elections held only in the white areas (as Donald Rumsfeld seems to envision) would produce a legitimate government:

Hell
Salon's war correspondent on the Iraq inferno.

Three years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, attacks in which they played no part, the people of Iraq have been liberated from one tyranny only to be remanded to another: continuous urban warfare, religious extremism and a contagion of fear. The celebrated hand of the free market in Iraq has brought not only cellphones and satellite TV, it has also brought down prices for automatic weapons, making them affordable to the average Iraqi. The last time I checked, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher cost about $250. In his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Bush told a subdued General Assembly, "Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term security of us all." The words of the president ring hollow.

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Traveller 2000, the Iraq edition

And this is where Bush comes in. He resolutely refuses to admit he's failing, badly. Iraq is a failure. It is now a terrorist training ground. The resistance is widely supported by Iraqis. If it wasn't, people with guns wouldn't have to hide their faces, Translators wouldn't have to fear being ratted out by kindly old ladies. His statements deny reality. The media isn't hiding the truth of reconstruction, there IS NO reconstruction. There is no way to build anything, when the engineers guide the guerrillas to the points in the piplelines to blow them up. Over 60 attacks in a year, about one a week or so. All effective. The fact that the reconstruction was run like a Stalinist hiring bureau, with ideological tests at every corner, and then promptly run into the ground like a Five Year plan, but quicker, is of note. We have done one thing, turn Iraq into a Steve Jackson game. A violent netherworld where the strongest gang has F-15's on call. Democracy? Elections? Not even in the room.

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Incident on Haifa Street

But let's turn from the large and statistical to a single incident that made the news repeatedly last week, an incident on Baghdad's Haifa Street, known locally as "Death Street" for the regular ambushes that take place there. The thoroughfare, part of a Sunni neighborhood in the capital that has been a hotbed of opposition to the Americans, lies across the Tigris river from, but only several hundred yards away from what's now being called the "International Zone" (as in neocolonial Shanghai) but is better known as the Green Zone, the highly fortified area where the U.S. embassy and the Allawi government have existed, until recently, in air-conditioned (relative) splendor.

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