Blogging the democratic revolution
Iraq the Model has a new banner; also a number of good posts, including a discussion of the recent investigation into allegations of electoral fraud in Iraq, a new security arrangement, and a whole lot more Iraqi democratic politics — check it out! While I’m writing, Academic Elephant has a pretty good blonde joke.
A representative of the electoral commission in Iraq has said that it has had to throw out less than 1% of the ballot boxes due to fraud, so if the unverified preliminary results are indeed correct, this won’t affect the outcome of the election. BAGHDAD ???????? Iraqi officials Monday concluded an inquiry into allegations of widespread fraud in the Dec. 15 elections by annulling returns from fewer than 1% of the ballot boxes, and said the action was unlikely to alter the overall result. The ruling by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq failed to placate secular and Sunni Arab…
Iraq the Model is talking about the death, shortages, corruption, and scandals that are taking a huge toll on public opinion in the country. Omar, known pretty well for his optimism, says that, “it is a fact that it hasn????????t been this bad in Iraq ever since the 9th of April 2003.” While I’m not one to disparage what we’re doing to build a healthy democracy in the country, it’s not easy to take a romanticized view of what’s going on and what it takes to solve these problems. I wrote many times, with much alarm, about the electoral violations…
Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace outlines in a brief policy paper what the current strategy for Iraq should be. To sum it up, the current momentum toward federalism is irreversible and the most important thing is to 1) convince Sunnis to accept it and 2) make sure that they get their fair share of the oil in their region. The U.S. can use troops withdrawals as a confidence-building measure that will eventually lead to this and, subsequently, a drop in violence. I agree that the oil distribution issue is probably the biggest issue facing the success…
Michael Totten has a really good piece in today’s Opinion Journal talking about how it is Lebanon, not Iraq, that is the Middle East’s first liberal democracy. I’m certainly inclined to agree with him. Lebanon is just about everything we could hope to strive for in Iraq over the next decade. A lot of his article focuses on the electoral system used in Lebanon, which is very strange by Western standards but guarantees people’s liberties by forcing the different groups in the country to share power. He says that, “Syria and Iraq, which also are composed of rival ethnic-religious sects,…
Now that I’ve fully recovered — it was so bad that it must have been bird flu — I can finally get back to what’s going on with the Iraqi election results. Only it’s already beginning to wind down. The political groups are criss-crossing with dozens of talks all over the country to work out a compromise. New elections are certainly out of the question, but it looks like some of the demands of the Sunnis and seculars will be fulfilled and the Shia-Kurdish alliance will evolve into more of a national unity government. Final results will be released in…
The Sunni lists, along with ex-PM Iyad Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list and others, have joined together to contest the results of the December 15 election in order, at the least, to have the results reviewed and their complaints addressed. At the most, some members of this new coalition have called for new elections altogether. BAGHDAD, Iraq Dec 22, 2005 ???????? Dozens of Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups threatened to boycott Iraq’s new legislature Thursday if complaints about tainted voting are not reviewed by an international body. A representative for former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi described the Dec. 15 vote…
Sunnis and secular parties are uniting in calling out the blatant fraud carried out by the Election Commission. BAGHDAD, Dec 21 (Reuters) – Iraq’s Sunni Arab and secular parties threatened on Wednesday to boycott the new parliament after alleging massive fraud in last week’s election, ramping up pressure on the triumphant Shi’ite Islamists to share power. Sunni rebels, whose informal truce helped push turnout to 70 percent as insurgents pitched for a voice in the new, full-term legislature, warned they would intensify attacks if the Shi’ite Alliance held on to the lion’s share of power. The Electoral Commission, which opposition…
All parties that are not from the religious Shia coalition or Kurdish parties are doubting the legitimacy of the Iraqi election preliminary results, and despite the title of this Washington Post article, it’s not just the Sunnis. Reading deeper, it’s independent Sunni parties, ex-PM Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list, and others. Even Moqtada al-Sadr, who allied his list with the UIA! They all have one thing in common: receiving many less seats than expected according to preliminary results. But, in fact, no preliminary results were expected as it was supposed to take two weeks to count the votes. According to this…
In the twilight of Iraq’s latest successful election, and before the doomsayers have a chance to get back on their callused feet, it’s worth taking the time to examine Iraq’s inexorable progress in gaining freedom — an immense project that is changing not just the lives of twenty-five million people (a praiseworthy feat in itself), but changing the face of the world. Less obvious than Iraq’s newfound and thrice-exercised democratic freedom, but equally important, is its burgeoning economic freedom. As reduced regulation, lowered taxation and less corruption allow resourceful Iraqis to drive their economy into a flexible regional powerhouse, the…
It was Mao Zedong who first said that, as long as a population remains neutral to an insurgency, the ultimate war against a government could be won. He layed out a three-pronged strategy for victory, which consisted of the preparation of an underground infrastructure, limited guerilla warfare, and eventually conventional warfare that would lead to victory. The most important of these stages is the first two, in which the insurgency lays the groundwork for mainstream support among the population so that it can begin engaging in operations. Writing in 1988 for the Airpower Research Institute, Colonel Dennis M. Drew evaluates…
The polls have closed in Iraq. Voter turnout was incredibly large, expected to be even higher than in January and October. All groups participated. For those of you wanting to know what’s going on, here’s a roundup where you can get all the information your heart desires. Pajamas Media has amazing on the ground reporting from several Iraqi cities. Gateway Pundit has a huge roundup. Iraq the Model is updating furiously on the ground. Bill Roggio is blogging from Barwana. Iraq Pundit relates his own experiences. Hammorabi is a blog worth scrolling all the way down. More as I see…
News reports are indicating that all sects of Iraqi society are turning out to vote, including the Sunnis who have made due to come out in full force. Turnout is expected to be larger than in the previous two elections. What we will witness today is not only another historic event as we saw in January and October, but a complete redefinition of the Iraqi political landscape as we know it. The January, 2005, assembly elections led to the utter domination of the parliament by just three parties, including the United Iraqi Alliance, the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan, and…
Today’s parliamentary election in Iraq will be the first that includes all major and minor groups turning out in full, making it the first truly representative government the country has had — ever. The important virtue of this is that of legitimacy, the only quality that will allow the government to operate as it needs to without major resistence. It would certainly begin the spelling of the end of the insurgency since their grievances would be able to be aired in official negotiation with other political parties. I am especially concerned about domination of the Interior Ministry by the Shiite…
I managed to watch some of Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the trial of Saddam Hussein. While he was in power, it was known that he was a semi-literate thug, albeit an exceptionally cunning one. He was reportedly frustrated by his inability to converse with other members of the Iraqi elite on equal terms because he couldn’t speak grammatically. This was certainly on full display today. It is hard to say how it would have sounded to a native speaker, but I thought that he came across as mentally dishevelled, using lots of non-standard Arabic vocabulary. This would be highly abnormal for…
This article will discuss the recently concluded Cairo conference of “national reconciliation” mostly as it was seen through the Arab media. The result is perhaps best summed up by Al-Hayat‘s headline on Nov. 22: “Cairo Conference: A Pass on American Withdrawal and Agreement on the ‘Legitimacy of Resistance’ and Rejection of ‘Terrorism’.” According to the same article, the final statement provided that Iraq sought “the withdrawal of foreign forces according to a fixed timetable, and the immediate establishment of a national program to rebuild the national security forces with regard to training, weapons and numbers on a peaceful basis, empowering…
I just spat my drink out through my nose, or would have if I’d been drinking, when I came across this subtitle at Reason: Palestine, not Iraq, is the best shot at an Arab democracy. I suppose in part that’s because I was recently planning on using the same comparison to make the point that externally imposing democracy is more likely to succeed than, well, anything at all in Palestine. After running through the usual pie in the sky hopes naive liberals commonly hold of a peaceful Palestinian people laying down their arms and taking up democratic politics, or at…
Following the approval of the new Iraqi constitution despite opposition by the majority of Sunnis, Sunni Iraqi leaders are getting serious about the political process and their own stakes in the new Iraq. This past week a new Sunni coalition party was formed from three parties – the Iraqi People’s Conference, the Iraqi Islamic Party, and the National Dialogue Council. According to the Iraqi newspaper Al-Bawaba, which emphasized not once, but twice, that these were the Sunnis who benefited from Saddam Hussein’s rule, the new party would be called “The Iraqi Consensus Party.” It program is to encourage Sunnis to…
It is true that the investigation just about completed by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald is not related to the Iraq war, but the incident giving rise to the investigation does relate to one of the reasons why the liberation of that country was necessary. For background you probably aren’t getting from the MSM, see my post, Background to the Plame Investigation: Iraq was Seeking Uranium from Niger for its Nuclear Ambitions. In the unlikely case that you missed the details of the investigation and the indictment of Scooter Libby and need to catch up, check out my post Mr.…
With the media headlining the anti-war camp’s bullet points and trumpeting the fact that 2,000 U.S. troops have now died in Iraq, it is time for some perspective. While we always hope to keep our own casualties to a minimum, war is part of the routine of life, and the reality of war is that casualties are inevitable. The idea that 2,000 fatalities is a high number for a war of any significance is not defensible. Below I have listed the total number of American military fatalities for the two world wars, the Korean war and the Vietnamese war (non-combat…
Iraq now has a constitution: pick your poison. (This is just a news update, any analysis will follow.)
Here’s my sad nominee, from Reuters AlertNet: Just down the street a fading “USA Is Good” slogan was daubed on a wall, a reminder of the days just after Saddam’s fall in 2003, before American occupation, insurgents bombings, kidnappings and shootings dashed hopes. (Formatting mine. Credit: Michael Georgy, Reuters.)
There’s been some buzz created with regards to the auditing of votes in Iraq due to ‘unusually high turnout.’ In fact, it was the top story on Google News the other day, though I’m not really sure why, given that the biggest effect it will have is delaying the results only a couple of days. Here’s the basic rundown: Iraqi election officials say it is too early to suspect problems during Saturday’s constitutional referendum, as workers continue to review ballots. Officials say workers are still auditing results for about 12 Shi’ite and Kurdish areas which reported unusually high totals of…
You may have all noticed that I haven’t posted a nice, long entry on Iraq since the referendum. Well, that’s because I’ve been holding my breath. I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, so there will be something much much bigger when some more indicative preliminary figures come in. One thing is for sure though. The January election and the October referendum were incredibly different emotional experiences for Americans who supported the war. Back then, we had no idea what would happen. It was one fell swoop of an emotional event, and when we saw Iraqis waving around…
John Hinderaker at Power Line asks whether the information to date demonstrates that large numbers of Sunnis did, in fact, vote for the new Iraqi constitution. RTWT. UPDATE: On the other hand, in the alternate reality-based community, the Sunnis are being subjugated — because, I suppose, the position held by the majority of Sunnis didn’t carry the referendum. Or something like that.