IRAQ PRE-ELECTION NEWS has a short shelf life, so I thought I would post some links while they were still fresh:
Insurgent attacks have climbed ahead of the vote starting tonight. The New York Times reported Friday that voters in Mosul may need cover provided by coalition snipers. Things seem better, though still dodgy, in Samarra. Iraqi officials on Friday announced the capture of three leading members of the insurgent group headed by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Multinational forces also captured about 20 other insurgents elsewhere around Iraq. The country seems gripped with voting fever, according to the London Times. The same seems to be true for Iraqi expats: An Iraqi-Canadian man from Winnipeg drove 14 hours to Calgary this week to cast a ballot in his homeland’s general election. For Radhi Aljanabi, one calculation of the price of freedom is $600 in expenses and the body-stiffening inconvenience of a long drive from Massachussetts to suburban Washington this weekend to vote. For years, the thousands of Kurds living in Nashville have blended into the city’s immigrant community, but now they are in the spotlight. In Australia, across the road from a polling station, a small group of protesters from the World Communist Party assembled to demonstrate against the elections. They later started photographing voters and became violent. All of which is a little odd, once you learn that Communists are running in Iraq.
If you want to get the opinions of Americans in Iraq, you can read one from Thomas Foreman, or this unknown soldier. You can also find a ton of links to soldiers’ blogs through The Mudville Gazette. Bear in mind that a soldier’s politics may not match yours; forewarned is forearmed (though not as armed as they are).
If you want to read what Iraqi bloggers are thinking, you could do worse than the links rounded up by Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine. After all, this story should be focused on the Iraqis.
And what might the outcome of the election be? Larry Kaplan at The New Republic thinks the result will not be “small-l” liberal:
“The most important such edict, issued by the country’s senior-most Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, urges Shia to vote next week for the United Iraqi Alliance slate of candidates, headed up by Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, a conservative cleric with close ties to Iran. The signature proposals of many candidates on the Sistani list span the entire spectrum of illiberalism, from rolling back women’s rights to stipulating in the constitution that Iraq be an Islamic state.”
In contrast, Amir Taheri thinks Iraq may vote for gridlock and that the Sistani slate is not that dangerous:
“The fact that Grand Ayatollah Ali Muhammed Sistani has effectively endorsed a single list of candidates (which is expected to win as many as 120 seats) must not be seen as a sectarian move — this “Shiite” list includes at least 30 Sunnis. Other “Shiite” seats will likely include 16 or so won by supporters of the Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick mullah. More than half of the 12 seats likely won by the Iraqi Communist Party (People’s Unity) will also go to Shiites — militantly anti-clerical ones.”