if I were Iraqi I wouldn't vote - too life threatening

[donsu]

http://counterpunch.org/fisk01122005.html


The City Where Even Police Hide Behind Masks

Fear Stalks Baghdad


-snip-

I call on an old Iraqi friend who used to publish a literary magazine during Saddam's reign. "They want me to vote, but they can't protect me," he says. "Maybe there will be no suicide bomber at the polling station. But I will be watched. And what if I get a hand-grenade in my home three days' later? The Americans will say they did their best; Allawi's people will say I am a 'martyr for democracy'. So, do you think I'm going to vote?"

-snip-

I drive back through the al-Hurriya intersection beside the "Green Zone" and suddenly there is a big black 4x4, filled with ski-masked gunmen. "Get back!" they scream at every motorist as they try to cut across the median. I roll the window down. The rear door of the 4x4 whacks open. A ski-masked Westerner--blond hair, blue eyes--is pointing a Kalashnikov at my car. "Get back!" he shrieks in ghastly Arabic. Then he clears the median, followed by three armoured pick-ups, windows blacked, tyres skidding on the road surface, carrying the sacred Westerners inside to the dubious safety of the "Green Zone", the hermetically-sealed compound from which Iraq is supposedly governed. I glance at the Iraqi press. Colin Powell is warning of "civil war" in Iraq. Why do we Westerners keep threatening civil war in a country whose society is tribal rather than sectarian? Of all papers, it is the Kurdish Al Takhri, loyal to Mustafa Barzani, which asks the same question. "There has never been a civil war in Iraq," the editorial thunders. And it is right.

So, "full ahead both" for the dreaded 30 January elections and democracy. The American generals--with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency--are now saying that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces may not be able to "fully" participate in the elections.

Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realise--as the generals all know--that those four provinces contain more than half of the population of Iraq.
------------------------------


If I was Iraqi I'd tell the americans to get out, then I will vote.

but I'm an american whose own vote went into the void of bushland so haven't the right to tell anyone anything about voting except: do it with paper and pen.

[bowens43]

1. The US backed candidate will win no matter

how the people vote. Does anyone really believe that the bushies will allow a free and fair election in Iraq when they won't even allow one in the US?

[burn the bush]

3. agreed why get blown up for it? That election is even worse than ours

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

2. Death is the ultimate exit poll n/t