Iraqi Voters select provincial Councils in Saturday's Vote
Iraqis go to the polls Saturday to vote in the first provincial elections since January, 2005. This time, two big things are different. The Sunni Arabs are not boycotting the election, as they did 4 years ago; and the Shiite parties are competing against one another rather than running as a monolithic coalition. These two changes bestow a dynamism on the process and make the outcome hard to predict. The final results may well tell us about likely changes in the composition of the Federal parliament in the national elections scheduled for December, 2009.
The LAT reports that the elections can only be held in Iraq via security arrangements that shut down traffic and interfere with ordinary life in other ways.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that despite a law forbidding campaigning within 24 hours of an election, most Iraqi parties went on trying to convince Iraqis to give them their votes right up to the last minute.
The number of candidates assassinated recently has risen to 8.
The Baghdad daily said that opinion polling done in Iraq recently suggested that voters will no longer confine themselves to casting their ballots for the religious (i.e. fundamentalist) parties, and that nationalist and secular parties are making a credible showing.
At the same time, clerics used their Friday prayer sermons to campaign for the political parties to which they belong. Cleric Muzaffar al-Musawi, the Imam-Jum`ah or chief Friday prayer leader in the East Baghdad slums of Sadr City, denounced anyone who did not vote for the Sadr Movement as a traitor to Iraq.
Meanwhile, in the Sunni Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad, Sheikh Abd al-Sattar al-Janabi read out a fatwa or considered legal opinion from the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, Abd al-Karim Zaydan, affirming the duty to vote and disallowing past excuses for staying home on election day (such as that the election is being held under conditions of foreign military occupation or that the results of the polls are illegally fixed and predetermined. These allegations, Zaydan says, do not remove the duty of the individual to vote.
Ayad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist of Shiite extraction who served as appointed, interim prime minister in 2004, accused incumbent parties of putting the resources of the government to work for them in their campaigns.
McClatchy reports that voters in Basra may be trying to settle political and personal scores by voting. Those Basrawis who hate the rigid, puritanical Mahdi Army may well vote for the Da'wa Party of PM Nuri al-Maliki, since al-Maliki sent the army last spring to crack down on the Sadrists in Basra.
McClatchy reports on a female, Sunni Arab candidate running in Diyala Province, whose husband (a provincial council member) has been kidnapped by insurgents; she is trying to use a seat on the provincial council to bargain for his release.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/31/2009 01:06:00 AM
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6 Comments:
Brilliant conversation:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html
January 30, 2009
Very often in the White House, the most momentous decisions are, at the time, the least dramatic, the least discussed. And they don't make news, or history, until much later, when their consequences bubble to the surface downstream. There are observers who think that could prove to be the case with a decision made within hours of Barack Obama's swearing in last week.
It started as a few lines in wire reports - a bit of buzz on the web - then a story here and there in the weekend papers. Unmanned American drones like this one, called Predators, honing in on villages in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, striking like silent intruders in the night, against suspected terrorists.
Early accounts of casualties varied from a dozen to more than 20 dead and wounded. One Pakistani security official told THE WASHINGTON POST that perhaps ten insurgents had been killed, maybe even a high value target, a senior member of al Qaeda or the Taliban. Then the TIMES of London quoted locals who said "... three children lost their lives" when the missiles destroyed several homes.
Since last August, 38 suspected U.S. missile strikes have killed at least 132 people in Pakistan, where allegedly we are not at war.
In next door Afghanistan, the number is much higher. For seven years American and NATO forces have been chasing Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban, not only with Predator drones, but with guided missiles and bomber raids as well. According to the United Nations and the organization Human Rights Watch, aerial bombing has killed or wounded more than a thousand civilians, what the Pentagon calls, "collateral damage."
The death of civilians has brought sharp criticism, including from some of our NATO allies and the president of Afghanistan. They believe the bombing is turning people in both Afghanistan and Pakistan against the West, actually undermining an effective campaign against terrorists.
The bombing of civilians from the sky is an old and questionable practice, argued over since the moment the military began to fly. It was deliberate strategy in World Wars I and II. American presidents approved it in Korea and extensively in Vietnam, again in the first Gulf War, then in Bosnia and Kosovo, and six years ago during the campaign of "shock and awe" over Iraq.
But what lifted those reports last weekend out of the routine is the simple fact that for the first time the air strikes occurred on President Obama's watch. As he said during his campaign, and as Secretary of Defense Gates reaffirmed this week, Obama is escalating America's military presence in Afghanistan....
-- Bill Moyers
While congratulating the election process in a country that is so fractured, how can there be an effective electoral process when there are reputedly 14,000 candidates running for 400 seats?
We had overload with the numbers of Democrats in the primary this time.
Thoughts?
With a societal lockdown the only way to hold elections in Iraq, one might also term voting as occurring in non-ordinary reality, i.e.: fantasy. I wouldn't hang my hopes on the outcome.
I'm sure this moment will be championed by the Bushites as a democratic step forward. And I am sure that it is. A terrible price has been paid by many to get us (them) even to this point.
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Mr. O'Neill,
here are my thoughts on having a lot of candidates.
Some lovers of the US Constitution, and the ideas and process that yielded it, are disappointed at the size of the US House of "Representatives."
If we had but 1 Congressman for every 100,000 citizens, there would be over 3,000 IN THE HOUSE.
Imagine how accessible, and responsive, each individual member would be.
But our system has evolved, and we now elect Princes to the Senate and Counts and Dukes to the House. The House of Lesser Lords.
Big Pharma, the Jewish Agency, and even Big Oil would go broke trying to buy up seats, if we right-sized the House. Lobbyists would have to revert to reason rather than roubles or rials.
To me, it sounds like you observe that the Iraqis have a more participatory, more representative government,
and then suggest that's a bad thing, but you don't explicate why. Is it because it might distract the ordinary voter from the Superbowl and Reality TV ?
Our system doesn't just disenfranchise Joe Sixpack; only a slim slice of society, maybe 25,000 people in all, get to influence our governance.
Professor Cole is one of them.
I think he is the only one that posts here that anyone in the Government listens to.
They should listen to him, but they should listen to me (and you) once in a while, too.
his avid student
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Dear Mr Anonymous:
Perhaps you can explain the advantage of having far more candidates than voters could humanly keep track of?
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