Ted,
I think a lot of the real conservatives will stay home on election day.
Speaking of nasty elections, imagine the potential for violence on Iraq's first election day.
Iraq Cleric Insists on Direct Elections
30 minutes ago
By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq (news - web sites)'s top Shiite cleric on Thursday maintained his demand for national elections, according to a U.N. envoy trying to work out differences over U.S. plans to transfer power to Iraqis this summer.
The handover has been further threatened by accelerated attacks against American forces and those who cooperate with them, including two suicide bombings against Iraqi targets on Tuesday and Wednesday that killed up to 100 people.
Hours after the latest suicide attack, two American soldiers were killed and another wounded by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, the U.S. military said Thursday.
Amid the violence, Iraq's U.S. administrators have been looking for a way to soothe opposition to their plans for creating a new provisional government in time for the June 30 target date.
Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, has shaken those plans with his insistence that national elections be held to create a new legislature.
He has criticized the U.S. plan to delay a ballot and instead let regional "caucuses" pick the legislatures as undemocratic. The call for elections prompted demonstrations by tens of thousands of his supporters last month — forcing Washington to request the U.N. mission in hopes of assuaging the cleric.
The 75-year-old cleric — who has refused to meet with U.S. officials, including the top American administrator, L. Paul Bremer — also demands that an elected legislature approve a temporary constitution still being drawn up, rather than the U.S.-picked Iraqi Governing Council.
The U.N. team, led by envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, has been examining whether elections are feasible ahead of the June 30 deadline.
U.S. administrators say that is not enough time to organize a proper vote, though they have said they're open to changes in the caucus system. Al-Sistani has said it is possible to organize elections ahead of the deadline. Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister, did not say whether the Shiite leader had changed that opinion.
The U.N. experts met with al-Sistani for two hours Thursday at his home in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, 90 miles south of Baghdad.
"Al-Sistani is still insisting on the elections," Brahimi told journalists afterward. He said the U.N. team and the cleric agreed that an election should be "well-prepared so that it will meet the desires of al-Sistani, the Iraqis and the United Nations (news - web sites)."
Shiites, thought to make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, have long been ruled over by Iraq's Sunnis, who are concentrated mostly in Baghdad and central Iraq, and were harshly suppressed under Saddam Hussein (news - web sites). They are now eager to run the country and would likely dominate elections, raising Sunni concerns.
Sunni supporters of Saddam's ousted regime are thought to be leading the campaign of violence against U.S. troops and Iraqis cooperating with the occupation. Foreign militants also have joined the fight.
The United States made public a letter to al-Qaida leaders thought to be sent by a Jordanian militant in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saying that insurgents are in a "race against time" to stop the power transfer, when Iraqi security forces will take a more prominent role.
The author of the letter — which the military said Monday it had found on a captured al-Qaida courier — lays out plans for a campaign of attacks on Iraqi "collaborators," Kurds and on Shiite Muslims, aimed at sparking a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. The coalition announced a $10 million bounty for al-Zarqawi.
U.S. military commanders in Baghdad said this week's rare consecutive suicide bombings may be connected to al-Zarqawi and the document he allegedly sent to al-Qaida.
In Wednesday's attack in Baghdad, an Oldsmobile packed with 300 to 500 pounds of explosives drove up to a crowd of Iraqis waiting outside an army recruitment center — only a few blocks from the heavily fortified Green Zone, headquarters of the U.S. administration. The driver detonated the explosives, killing 47 people and wounding 55, the U.S.-led coalition said.
A day earlier, a truck carrying a similar amount of explosives blew up outside a police station in the mostly Shiite town, Iskandariyah, south of the capital, killing 53 Iraqis, including would-be recruits lined up to apply for jobs.
Iskandariyah, where Tuesday's blast took place, "is right on the line between Sunni and Shiite, so the attack there might be trying to foment some kind of civil war," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.
A U.S. official in Washington said al-Zarqawi's involvement could not be ruled out, but that the blasts were more likely the work of supporters of Saddam Hussein. "They view police in training to be collaborators with the U.S.," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Wednesday's deaths bring to 374 the number of Americans who have been killed in hostile action since the beginning of military operations in Iraq. A total of at least 537 Americans have died, including non-combat deaths.
On Thursday, two mortar shells exploded near a police station and a hotel housing journalists in the southern town of Samawah, where Japanese troops have deployed, but no injuries were reported. |
