Month: January 2005

No warbots will be quoting Raed today. He is mad. By Raed’s calculation, turnout was less than 50%, at best, counting expats.

Vote For Food

In other news….

Get ready for The Morning After:

Mosul – The local electoral commission representative only began his work in earnest a week ago after his predecessor and entire staff resigned two months earlier.

A few hundred electoral workers were hastily flown in from Baghdad at the last minute, with most receiving only two hours of training. There was also a virtual absence of any independent election monitors.

The results were evident inside the polling stations.

At the Al-Khazrajiya school in the city’s old quarter, Najat Ridha, 48, was ushered into a classroom and handed two ballots, one for the national assembly and another for the local provincial council.

An election worker suggested she vote for list 285 headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and a local list headed by governor Duraid Kashmula.

She ticked the boxes obligingly and walked out – just as Zahra Ibrahim, 60, did before her.

“I really just did what they asked me to do,” she said as the Iraqi national anthem crackled on a loudspeaker in the background.

Similar scenes unfolded at the Al-Fadhila school on the west side as men and women, perplexed over what the list numbers stood for, were offered suggestions and a helping hand by election workers.

“I want to vote for Allawi and Yawar,” said a frustrated Fatima Hashim, 50.

Both Dr Allawi and interim President Ghazi al-Yawar, himself from Mosul, head competing lists for seats on the national assembly, but were popular choices in the city because of their high profile.

The lists, which only bear numbers and not candidate names for the most part, were published only two days before.

At a polling station in the New Mosul neighbourhood, Mahasin Ahmed, 37, a school teacher, wanted to vote for Yawar, a tribal leader, but did not know that his list number was 255 and neither did the election worker helping her.

He suggested she vote for list 188 because it had “tribes” in the title.

“I found most of the election workers unqualified and I observed many irregularities,” said Guevara Yokhana, 34, a Christian running in the local elections, who visited seven of the 20 polling stations on the city’s east side.

He said a lack of ballot papers sparked riots in the town of Qaraqush as thousands of furious Christians and Kurds realised they were unable to vote.

A Patriotic Union for Kurdistan official described a similar situation in Bashiqa district.

The London Telegraph speculates:

An RAF C130 Hercules transport aircraft, believed to have been carrying SAS troops, crashed 20 miles north-west of Baghdad yesterday.

Rescue helicopters flew over the crash site searching for any sign of life. But with the wreckage said to be spread over a wide area there was little hope that anyone had survived.

At RAF Lyneham, Wilts, Wing Commander Nigel Arnold said: “We are in the process of contacting the families of those involved and until that is done I’m, afraid we will not be releasing any details of the crew.”

A senior US military officer in Iraq said the aircraft was on its way to the large US base at Balad, which is used by allied special forces to mount operations in a number of towns inside the so-called Sunni Triangle.

It was not immediately clear what caused the crash but the most likely explanation seemed to be that it had been shot down by insurgents. The incident is believed to mark the largest single loss of British personnel since the start of the war, almost two years ago.

A “special duties” aircraft would normally carry a crew of five or six. It could carry up to 128 passengers but in a special forces role, a maximum of 70 is more likely.
[…]
The worst loss of life for the SAS since the Second World War was in the Falklands when 18 members were killed. A total of 76 British servicemen and women have died since the start of the war in Iraq.

If the aircraft was shot down, it would represent a major success for the insurgents who have been trying to disrupt the Iraqi elections. US aircraft and helicopters have been regularly targeted with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles. But although dozens of US helicopters have been brought down, until now no fixed-wing aircraft has crashed as a result of enemy attack.
[…]
RAF Hercules operating in Iraq are fitted with several types of so-called DAS counter-measures against the heat-seeking guidance sensors of the missiles.

They are based at Basra International Airport or al-Udeid base in Qatar and make regular “milk run” flights to Baghdad airport with supplies for personnel at the British Embassy and nearby US military headquarters.

The only RAF C130s known to operate north of Baghdad are the “special duties” aircraft of 47 Sqn based at Lyneham.

Here’s a great post by swopa at needlenose to take you step by step on how we got to this day of triumph for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who, by the way, did not vote because he is Iranian.

When you erect the goalposts just beyond the line of scrimmage and make them 500-bodies wide, it’s hard not to kick the ball of ridiculously low expectations through. Yes, it’s great that Iraq’s elections turned out less bloody than even the warbots anticipated, but they would have called it a success no matter what. The Glenn Reynoldses and Victor Davis Hansons recognize no falsifiability "metric" for their position, anyway. But the questions for everyone else are as follows: Will the election be a success no matter what comes of it? No matter who wins? Even if the hundreds of newly elected officials become unwilling participants in an assassination sweepstakes?

Simply holding an election in which "only" 40 or so people die is "success"? If you say so. But could we please maintain this standard for the Ukrainians (oops, too late), the Russians, and – for God’s sake – the Iranians???

In responding to Sophie Johnson’s letter yesterday, I said that Vojvodina was ceded to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of Trianon (1920). A fellow historian wrote me yesterday to say that while this is technically correct, Serbia’s claim to this territory is even stronger: a popular assembly of Serbs – but also Slovaks, Ruthenians, Wallachs and others – living in areas of Baranja, Backa and Banat voted on 26 November 1918 to join the Kingdom of Serbia. Another area within today’s Vojvodina, Srem, had a similar assembly a day earlier. (Parts of Baranja and Srem were given to Croatia by the Communists after 1945). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) – a union between the Kingdom of Serbia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (teritories formerly ruled by Austria-Hungary, with the exception of Vojvodina) was established on 1 December 1918. Yugoslavia was therefore not created by the Treaty of Versailles, but recognized therein as an independent state. This is obvious from the text of the Treaty of Trianon, which explicitly mentions the “Kingdom of the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes.”

Hala Jaber in the Sunday Times:

“For what its worth, the election did go much, much better than many expected, both from the point of view of turnout, and from the point of view of security. After all, the Ministry of the Interior’s official figure of 36 killed, mostly civilians, is not really a high price in a country where daily you have such numbers dying in one way or another.

Yeah, might as well die for “democracy” if you’re going to get killed in the violence of Occupied Iraq, anyway. Is she related to Mad Madeleine?

To paraphrase the statements of Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Culture, if we knew, let’s say, that a million people would die in the liberation of Iraq, most Americans would oppose it. A couple thousand, though? That’s more reasonable. If only a couple hundred were to die, by all means, send in the troops. A few, (or a few thousand), innocent deaths is just an unfortunate but necessary by-product of war.

Such thinking is, for lack of a better word, evil….. Emily Katz

Evil is a suitable word. The count is up to 44 now. I suppose Hana will let us know when the price goes too high.