The Projected Winner in Iraq: Failure

[RedEarth]

The Projected Winner in Iraq: Failure
by Edwin Black

Iraq's proposed elections later this month are a lose-lose proposition.

Most Sunni and Kurdish political parties have either formally withdrawn or are threatening to because the insurgency has now targeted the entire electoral process. That reality has been driven home daily. Last month, a grenade was tossed into a school with a note warning the building to not become a polling place. Weeks ago, an election commissioner on Baghdad's main street was dragged from his car in broad daylight and shot in the head by men who didn't even mask their faces.

Osama bin Laden has declared in an audiotape that those who participate in the election - even by voting - will be deemed infidels and targeted. Electoral commissioners have resigned en masse. The Association of Muslim Scholars, Iraq's highest Sunni religious authority, has demanded all Sunnis boycott the election.

But the Shias are adamant that elections proceed. Their supreme religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, has decreed that voting is the highest religious obligation. Sistani rebuffed recent Sunni-Kurd election delay requests, saying the question was "not even up for discussion." Indeed, a delay makes no sense, as the insurgency becomes only more lethal with each day. Hence, Arab Sunnis and Kurds - together some 40 percent of the population - are now on an electoral collision course with the majority Shias, who compose approximately 60 percent. The dynamics of this looming showdown embody the very ethnic torrents that have plagued Iraq for centuries. Minority Sunnis and majority Shias have massacred and oppressed each other in Iraq since the seventh century, taking time off to do the same for minorities such as Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jews and Kurds.

Since the 1920s, Sunni Ba'athist strongmen have ruled, Saddam Hussein being the latest. The concept of one-man one- vote, in which the results will parallel the religious groups, automatically guarantees that the Shia majority will finally seize control of the nation, settling old scores and disenfranchising everyone else. This only sets the stage for another civil war.

Historically, the assumption or seizure of authority in Iraq has never constituted a true representative government accepted by the warring tribal factions, but rather an expression of ethnic supremacy. More and more, the Jan. 30 vote seems not a national election, but a mainly Shia election. So even if the election takes place, even if the Shias deliver a statistical majority for the turnout, the forces of Sunni and insurgent rejection will demonize the results and elected officials, thus further plunging the populace into violence.

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views05/0112-33.htm

[Wright Patman]

1. The Sunnis'

ability to consolidate power by force was also seen in the triumph of Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam, under the original warlord of the house of Saud.

I wouldn't count the Sunnis out by any means. They'll be knocking off the Shia and Kurds along with any GIs or Marines who get in the way for the next however many years the U.S. is cursed with a leader who thinks our servicemembers belong there.

And I am not convinced things would be appreciably different had Kerry been elected, from the way he was talking during the campaign.

The only logical and sensible thing for any person to do in the U.S. is to avoid military service at all cost until sanity returns. And that may be a LONG way off. As in generations into the future.