ELECTIONS IN IRAQ….I missed this when it happened ? I guess everyone was too wrapped up in Rathergate to give it much attention ? but Tim Dunlop points out today that there was an election recently in Iraq that might be a foretaste of the countrywide elections scheduled for January.
Earlier this month, the Iraqi National Council elected four vice-chairs. Over at Foreign Policy In Focus, Frank Smyth summarizes the results:
In the September balloting, the delegate from the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Jawad al-Maliki, came in first with 56 votes. This is a Shiite group that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lambasted as a tool of Iran during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Another Iraqi even less attractive to Washington, the Secretary General of the Iraqi Communist Party (www.iraqcp.org), Hamid Majid Moussa, came in second with 55 votes.
Meanwhile, Rasim al-Awadi, the delegate from the Iraqi National Accord ? the group once backed by the CIA and whose leader, Iyad Allawi, who was supported by the Bush administration to become the Iraqi prime minister ? came in third with 53 votes. Nasir A`if al-Ani ? the delegate from the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, sympathetic to the Ba?athist-based, anti-American resistance operating both west and north of Baghdad ? came in fourth with 48 votes.
Juan Cole, who did notice this at the time, quipped, “So, this list is further evidence that the US invaded Iraq to install in power a coalition of Communists, Islamists and ex-Baathist nationalists. If you had said such a thing 3 years ago you would have been laughed at.”
No one’s laughing now. After all, if this reflects the likely results of January’s elections, what are the odds that Iraq 2.0 is going to be friendly toward the United States?
