Top Iraq groups demand poll delay

[kayaman+]

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=629 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD colSpan=3>Top Iraq groups demand poll delay

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Iraq's Shia leaders have been keen to ensure polls go ahead

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!-- E IIMA -->Several leading Iraqi political parties have called for the national elections scheduled for 30 January to be delayed.

At least 10 political groups, including the two large Kurdish parties and the party of former presidential candidate Adnan Pachachi, have backed the call.

Fierce fighting between insurgents and US-led forces in Sunni Arab areas has already prompted Iraq's top Sunni parties to threaten a poll boycott.

Iraq's interim constitution says polls must take place by the end of January.



The Iraqi electoral commission has said it will consider the parties' demand for the polls to be postponed by six months.

"We will examine this request tomorrow morning. It's a very complicated question," commission spokesman Abdel Hussein al-Hindawi told French news agency AFP.

Representatives of Iraq's Shia community, which accounts for about 60% of the population, have said they are keen to avoid any delay in holding elections.

Petition

The BBC's Caroline Hawley in Baghdad says the unstable security situation is not the only factor behind calls for the delay. Kurdish groups in the north of the country are said to be concerned that heavy snow in January may hinder their participation in the process.

The political parties signed a petition calling for the postponement after a meeting at Mr Pachachi's house on Friday. At least three cabinet ministers from the interim government are said to have been present. There are unconfirmed reports that a representative of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's party signed the petition.

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[peskypup]

another is due

Iraqi mission statement number 5,334,578 is now due from the White House sometime in the next 2 weeks. Yet another strategy torpedoed.

I strongly suspect the W in George W bush stand for Witless and not Walker. he shoulda listened to George senior on this one and stayed out of Iraq. He couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery never mind a traditionally testing Middle East country with numerous minority groups with a long history of not getting along together.

 

[Marco]

Dubya was never too good at listening to daddy, hell, he didn't even remember Cheney's comments more than a decade ago about how fruitless an operation an invasion of Iraq would be and that it'd lead to little more than a quagmire. But then again ole' Cheney seemed to forget too....funny how money makes one forget....

But then again if you listen to the radical repubs you will know that there are flowers growing where once there were only bomb craters and civilians, and all is well in Iraq with an invincible democracy in place, and peace at last, just like the Israelis and the Palestinians enjoy now.

BTW, does anyone know where OBL is at?

 

[xpanda]

Iraqi mission statement number 5,334,578 is now due from the White House sometime in the next 2 weeks. Yet another strategy torpedoed.

I strongly suspect the W in George W bush stand for Witless and not Walker. he shoulda listened to George senior on this one and stayed out of Iraq. He couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery never mind a traditionally testing Middle East country with numerous minority groups with a long history of not getting along together.

LMAO.

 

[docmercer--banned]

Marco: Ya mean this speech??

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer dug up the text of a speech Cheney gave in Seattle in August 1992, while serving as secretary of defense for the first President Bush. Back then Cheney argued that taking over Iraq wouldn't be worth the cost in U.S. lives, and would lead to a quagmire. In light of the turmoil there now, the irony of his words is as rich as vast fields of Iraqi crude. Ditto regarding Cheney's timing on the threat Saddam may have posed: The Iraqi dictator, as we now know, was much closer to wielding nuclear weapons at the time of the first Gulf War -- when Cheney said Baghdad was a no-go -- than when the Bush administration launched the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.


"The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney asked during the 1992 speech. "And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."

What, back then, did Cheney think those problems would look like?

"Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place?" Cheney asked. "You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq."

When Cheney and his colleagues in the second Bush White House did apparently decide to "accept the responsibility for governing Iraq" in 2003, it seems they would've been wise to consider the prescient analysis of the former defense secretary... Dick Cheney: "Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi'ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there."

 

[GAMEFACE]

Maybe we should take over the country. We could build bases around the major oil producing areas and sit back and just let them kill eachother.

Since this was all about the oil we might as well take it.

 

[xpanda]

Maybe we should take over the country. We could build bases around the major oil producing areas and sit back and just let them kill each other.

Aren't you in luck, then?!? Mission accomplished, peaches!

Re: the article: it's hardly a surprise that Sunnis would clamour for a postponement of the election. They're a minority, after all. The Shi'ia will undoubtedly be responsible for the elected officials and the Sunnis will be marginalised. (Who wants to take bets that Moqtada al Sadr, despite enormous popularity, won't be allowed to run on the ballot???) Once the US high tails it out of there (probably in late February, early March) civil war will erupt and eventually Iraq will likely splinter.

This is what you get for thinking that top-down democracy was at all plausible.