Iraqi Vote Victory

[headpusher]

IRAQI VOTE VICTORY

By RALPH PETERS

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October 18, 2005 -- RISKING death, Iraqis of every background came out to vote on Saturday. Terrorists proved powerless to halt the country's progress. The final count isn't in, but the people appear to have approved a new constitution.

Never before in the Arab world have a country's citizens been permitted to vote on the laws that would govern them. Even had the draft constitution been rejected, this would have been a historic moment in the Middle East and beyond.

Our media's response? The vote doesn't matter. The constitution's flawed. Iraq's Sunni Arabs will resort to civil war. Enormous problems remain.

Well, big problems do remain in Iraq. There's certainly a potential for more internal strife. The constitution isn't perfect.

But to suggest that at least 9 million Iraqis casting peaceful ballots don't matter is just sour grapes on the part of those journalists and editors who've have been relentless in predicting failure in Iraq — and who've been wrong every single time.

If the day comes when the last U.S. troops leave a peaceful, democratic, prosperous Iraq, the headlines will read: "FAILURE IN IRAQ: THREE SUNNIS STILL UNHAPPY. "

Iraq may yet fail as a unified state. Violence will continue. But what's frustrating is the determination of so many in our media to convince the American people that Iraq's a hopeless mess. It's an example of vanity, selfishness and spite virtually without precedent in the history of journalism.

The greatest tragedy imaginable for our "mainstream media" would be to have to admit that President Bush was right about Iraq.

A startling number of editors and opinion columnists have been wrong about every development in Iraq (and Afghanistan). First, they predicted a bloody, protracted war against Saddam's military. Then they predicted civil war. They insisted that Iraq's first elections would fail amid a bloodbath. Then they declared that Iraq's elected delegates would not be able to agree on a draft constitution. Next, they thundered that Iraq's Sunni Arabs wouldn't vote.

Most recently, the sages of the opinion pages declared that the proposed constitution would be defeated at the polls by the Sunni Arabs. All along they've displayed a breathtaking empathy with the Islamist terrorists who slaughter the innocent, giving Abu Musab al-Zarqawi a pass while attacking our president and mocking the achievements of our troops.

A herd mentality has taken over the editorial boards. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, columnists write about our inevitable "retreat" from Iraq, declaring that "everyone knows" our policies have no chance of success.

That isn't journalism. It's wishful thinking on the part of those who need Iraq to fail to preserve their credibility.

We are dealing with parasitical creatures who, never having done anything practical themselves, insist that the bravery and sacrifice of others has no meaning. Their egos have grown so enormous that they would sacrifice the future of Iraq's 26 million human beings just so they could write "I told you so." And, of course, the greatest military experts are those who never served a day in uniform.

The mission we've set for ourselves in Iraq is a tough one. Mistakes made it even harder. But any man or woman of integrity would have to admit that our troops have performed with remarkable skill and tenacity — and that the Iraqi people have displayed confounding courage in their efforts to build a just government for themselves.

There are two things the "mainstream media" are simply unwilling to face regarding Iraq. First, the stakes are immensely high and the premature withdrawal demanded by the pundits would fatally increase the power and allure of Islamist terrorists. Second, we're not only asking a major state to change its form of government — we're asking people to fundamentally alter a failed civilization.

Such a goal cannot be accomplished overnight. Or even in the course of a single administration. Iraq is about the greater fate of the realm of lethal failure stretching from Gibraltar to the Indus.

But we won't see a rational discussion of the roots of the Middle East's cultural collapse — such honesty is taboo. Instead, we'll just hear more about our own "failure" in Iraq, no matter how many successes there are on the ground. Our columnists and editors resemble those diehard communists who kept on praising Stalin right through the purges, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the revelations about the Gulag.

We'll hear that Iraq's new constitution is flawed (so is ours — that's why we have amendments). We'll be told that the Sunni Arabs are dissatisfied (so are many American Democrats). Allegations of electoral fraud will never go away (sound familiar?). And political partisans will continue to claim that our military efforts are useless (as demagogues have claimed since the Civil War).

Despite the attacks by international terrorists and the media, Iraq continues to move forward. The process is imperfect, as are all things on this earth. But the bravery and determination that Iraqis displayed at the polls again last weekend deserve better analysis than smug pundits' party-line declarations of failure.

Ralph Peters' lastest book is "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy."

[drlogic]

"That isn't journalism. It's wishful thinking on the part of those who need Iraq to fail to preserve their credibility."

BINGO!

If that alone does not highlight the depths to which the American left and their butt pirates in the press have sunk to, nothing will!

History will NOT be kind to today's American left, democratic party and liberal agenda driven media.

[igloo]

"That isn't journalism. It's wishful thinking on the part of those who need Iraq to fail to preserve their credibility."

BINGO!

If that alone does not highlight the depths to which the American left and their butt pirates in the press have sunk to, nothing will!

History will NOT be kind to today's American left, democratic party and liberal agenda driven media.

Fucking on point!

The sad part is that there are actually Americans rooting for failure, for a variety of shameful reasons........it does not matter if you were pro-war or anti-war before the Iraq war, but should be rooting for success, pulling together to make it successful, stop praying to the doom and gloom gods, and STOP giving those who are aligned against us morale boosts and impressions of a country with no resolve to stick it out (which is exactly what their gameplan is).

[igloo]

Gave this piece another read because it is outstanding...one of the most accurate, on point, compelling, and unfortunately, sadly true commentary on the reality of today's media and those who are anti-Bush......

[destruction]

Hold your horses. Don't count your chickens before they hatch.

Posted on Wed, Oct. 19, 2005

Results from Iraq vote delayed

By MARIAM FAM

The Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Final results from Iraq’s landmark referendum on a new constitution will likely not be announced until Friday at the earliest because of delays getting counts to the capital and a wide-ranging audit of an unexpectedly high number of “yes” votes, election officials said.

The returns have raised questions over the possibility of irregularities in the balloting. With the delays, the outcome of the crucial referendum will remain up in the air possibly into next week, at a time when the government had hoped to move public attention to a new milestone: the start of the trial of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein today.

Meanwhile, insurgent attacks began to heat up again after being nearly silent on referendum day Saturday, when polling stations were heavily protected across the country.

A U.S. soldier was shot and killed in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, early Tuesday, the military said. In fighting in western Iraq, two U.S. Marines and four militants were killed Monday near the town of Rutba, not far from the Jordanian border, the military said. At least 1,980 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Gunmen killed the deputy governor of Anbar province, Talib Ibrahim, spraying his car with automatic weapons fire in Ramadi and wounding two of his bodyguards, police said. Anbar, the vast western Sunni region, is the main battleground between insurgents and U.S.-Iraqi forces.

Also Tuesday, an Internet statement released in the name of al Qaeda in Iraq denounced Arab League plans to stage a reconciliation conference among all Iraq’s factions.

The Arab League plans to hold a reconciliation conference at its Cairo headquarters but a date has not been set.

League Secretary-General Amr Moussa is expected to travel to Iraq on Thursday, his first visit since Saddam’s ouster, to try to organize it.

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/12937913.htm

[destruction]

POLITICS-IRAQ:

Vote Figures for Crucial Province Don't Add Up

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (IPS) - The early vote totals from Nineveh province, which suggested an overwhelming majority in favour of Iraq's draft constitution that assured its passage by national referendum, now appear to have been highly misleading.

The final official figures for the province, obtained by IPS from a U.S. official in Mosul, actually have the constitution being rejected by a fairly wide margin, but less than the two-thirds majority required to defeat it outright.

Both the initial figures and the new vote totals raise serious questions about the credibility of the reported results in Nineveh. A leading Sunni political figure has already charged that the Nineveh vote totals have been altered.

According to the widely cited preliminary figures announced by the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) in Nineveh, 326,000 people voted for the constitution and 90,000 against. Those figures were said to be based on results from more than 90 percent of the 300 polling stations in the province.

Relying on those "unofficial" figures, the media reported that the constitution appeared to have been passed -- on the assumption that the Sunnis had failed to muster the necessary two-thirds "no" vote in Nineveh. No further results have been released by the IECI since then, and the final tally from the national referendum is not expected until Friday at the earliest.

However, according to the U.S. military liaison with the IECI in Nineveh, Maj. Jeffrey Houston, the final totals for the province were 424,491 "no" votes and 353,348 "yes" votes. This means that the earlier figures actually represented only 54 percent of the official vote total -- not 90 percent, as the media had been led to believe. And the votes which had not been revealed earlier went against the constitution by a ratio more than 12 to 1.

These ballots could only have come from the Sunni sections of Mosul, a city of 1.7 million people. Although the votes from polling centres in those densely populated urban areas would take longer to count than those from more sparsely populated towns and cities outside Mosul, they should not have taken much longer than those for the Kurdish sections of Mosul.

Thus there seems to be no logistical reason for failing to announce the results for the 340,000 votes that went overwhelmingly against the constitution. Rather, the evidence suggests that it was a deliberate effort to mislead the media by Kurdish and Shiite political leaders who were intent on ensuring that the constitution would pass.

They knew that all eyes would be on Nineveh as the province where the referendum would be decided. By issuing figures that appeared to show that the vote in Nineveh was a runaway victory for the constitution, they not only shaped the main story line in the media that the constitution had already passed, but effectively discouraged any further media curiosity about the vote in that province.

The final figures revealed by the U.S. military liaison with the IECI suggest a voter turnout in Nineveh that strains credibility. On a day when Sunni turnout reached 88 percent in Salahuddin province and 90 percent in Fallujah, a total of only 778,000 votes -- about 60 percent of the eligible voters -- in Nineveh appears anomalous. Even if the turnout in the province had only been 70 percent, the total would have been 930,000.

The final vote totals suggest that the Sunnis, who clearly voted with near unanimity against the constitution, are a minority in the province. It is generally acknowledged that Sunnis constitute a hefty majority of the population of Nineveh, although Kurdish leaders have never conceded that fact.

A total of 350,000 votes for the constitution in the province is questionable based on the area's ethnic-religious composition. The final vote breakdown for the January election reveals that the Kurds and Shiites in Nineveh had mustered a combined total of only 130,000 votes for Kurdish and Shiite candidates, despite high rates of turnout for both groups.

To have amassed 350,000 votes for the constitution, they would have had to obtain overwhelming support from the non-Kurdish, non-Arab minorities in the province.

According to official census data, before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Assyrian Christians and Sunni Arabs accounted 46 percent of the more than 350,000 people on the Nineveh plain. Most of the others are Shabaks and Yezidis. Kurds represented just 6 percent of the population.

But the Kurds have asserted political control over the towns and villages of the plains, with a heavy Kurdish paramilitary and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) presence. That Kurdish presence provoked widespread opposition and some public protests among non-Kurdish communities on the plains, especially Christians and Shabaks.

Assyrian Christians are particularly afraid the constitution's article 135, which divides the Christian community into Chaldeans and Assyrians, will be used by Kurds to expropriate their lands and villages in North Iraq.

Michael Youash, director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project in Washington, has spoken with Assyrian Christian leaders in two district towns, Bakhdeda and BarTilla, on the Nineveh plain where Christians represent roughly half the combined total population of more than 100,000 people.

He says Assyrian Christian political organisations mounted big demonstrations against the constitution in both towns, and that their local leaders are sure that very high percentages in both towns voted against the constitution.

In response to an e-mail query, Maj. Houston, the U.S. military liaison with the IECI, said, "It was my understanding that the Christian communities would be opposed to the constitution," but he dismissed the suspicions of vote fraud in the province.

Saleh al-Mutlek, one of the Sunni negotiators on the constitution last summer and now a leading opponent of the constitution, told reporters, "There is a scheme to alter the results" of the vote. He alleged that members of the Iraqi National Guard had seized ballot boxes from a polling station in Mosul and transferred them to a governorate office controlled by Kurds.

A former U.S. military liaison with the Nineveh province IECI has confirmed a similar incident of seizure of ballot boxes from a polling station during the January elections.

According to Maj. Anthony Cruz, Kurdish militiamen tried to bribe local electoral commission staff to accept ballots that had obviously been tampered with. Cruz also confirmed a much larger ballot-stuffing scheme by Kurdish officials in the province, as reported by IPS in September.

On Monday, the Electoral Commission announced that it would conduct an audit to examine the high "yes" vote, but it is not clear that it will include the results in Nineveh.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June. (END/2005)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=30692