Antiwar.com Blog

In a post called “Collateral Damage,” Roger L. Simon writes

“When you read reports like this, you gasp, even though you know they may be exaggerated or even pure propaganda. But then when you read this, your mind focuses again on the greater reality.”

Yes, the fact that 2.5 years after Bush’s Mayday “Mission Accomplished” speech, Iraq is in such chaos that the USAF is still bombing from the air, and killing 39 civilians – including 18 children, is shocking at first, until one realizes that it’s all for the greater good – er – reality.

We have to keep in mind that the unalienable right to life doesn’t exist for you if you live across water from here, and that yes, somehow, sinking to Saddam’s level makes it all worth while.

Iraqi election officials said today that they were investigating what they described as “unusually high” vote totals in 12 Shiite and Kurdish provinces, where as many 99 percent of the voters were reported to have cast ballots in favor of Iraq’s new constitution, raising the possibility that the results of Saturday’s referendum could be called into question.

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Saddam ‘wins 100% of vote’

There were 11,445,638 eligible voters – and every one of them voted for the president, according to Izzat Ibrahim, Vice-Chairman of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council.

The government insists the count was fair and accurate.

There must be some reason why Patrick J. “Bulldog” Fitzgerald’s office made this announcement now. That sound you don’t hear is Washington, D.C. holding its collective breath ….

As you may already know, Saddam Hussein is being tried for the 1982 massacre of 143 people in Shi’ite Dujail after a failed assassination attempt — not for much larger crimes committed during the Iran-Iraq war (including against Kurdish civilians at Halabja) or during the invasion of Kuwait, but for a relatively small reprisal following an assassination attempt. (“Relatively small” compared both to Saddam’s other crimes and to the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died to avenge an alleged assassination attempt against George H.W. Bush in 1993.) And Saddam may never stand trial for anything else:

There will be no jury. The chief judge will question witnesses, and all five judges will decide the guilt or innocence of Saddam and his seven co-defendants. The judges will be permitted to draw help from international advisers.

Saddam will sit with his co-defendants, probably behind protective glass. He will have the right to call witnesses and, if convicted, to lodge numerous appeals before any sentence could be carried out. Each defendant will have at least one lawyer.

If convicted, Saddam can appeal to a nine-judge tribunal that is part of the special Iraqi tribunal set up to investigate crimes allegedly committed by Saddam and others during his 23-year rule.

If the sentence is upheld after all appeals are exhausted, then it must be implemented within 30 days, regardless of other judicial proceedings. If Saddam should be sentenced to death, that means he could be executed while some of the dozen or so trials he is expected to face go unfinished.

This quite obviously being the reason.

The consensus today seems to be that, “In the crucial central provinces with mixed ethnic and religious populations, enough Shiites and Kurds voted to stymie the Sunni bid to reject the constitution.”

According to the AP report,

The Sunni ”no” campaign appeared to have made the two-thirds threshold in Anbar province, the vast western Sunni heartland where Ramadi is the capital, and in Salahuddin, where Sunnis hold a large majority and as many as 90 percent of voters cast ballots. But in two other provinces where Sunni Arabs have only slim majorities — Ninevah and Diyala — the ”yes” vote apparently won out.

Sunni leaders responded angrily, some of them saying they suspected fraud and accusing American officials and the Shiite parties that dominate the government.

As Chris Albritton pointed out in a passage I quoted yesterday,

The absolute worst-case scenario is if the Sunnis come close to defeating the constitution, but fail. There will be accusations of vote-rigging and any political momentum the Sunnis felt was moving their way will be spent. The Shi’ites will have consolidated their power and those Sunnis on the fence might be moved into active opposition. The insurgency might even worsen, if such things are possible, or a close vote might be the trigger for open civil war.
[…]
I do think that defeating the constitution might be best in the long run. It will embolden the Sunnis and give them a political win, motivating them to further involve themselves in the political process. This will force the Shi’ites and Kurds to deal with real elected representatives instead of appointed ones. Will this spell and end to violence? Of course not, but anything that allows the Sunnis to claim victory instead of forcing them to eat political table scraps is a big step in ending the Sunni-led insurgency.

Of course, as so often is the case in Iraq, the worst case scenario was the most likely scenario. John Ward Anderson and K.I. Ibrahim report in the Washington Post today:

But it was unclear whether Sunnis would stay engaged in the political process if they thought it was stacked against them or perceived that they lost the referendum by fraud. Months of negotiations to win broad support from Iraq’s three main communities largely failed, as demonstrated by the Sunnis’ overwhelming rejection of the charter. In a sign of how deep and hard divisions ran, the no vote was as high as 90 percent in some Sunni communities, while some Shiites approved the charter by a similar figure, local officials said.
[…]
As early tallies from the constitutional referendum emerged Sunday, some Sunni leaders cried foul, saying their field surveys showed that they had in fact crossed the threshold for defeating the proposal. They charged that the U.S.-backed government, a coalition of Shiite and Kurdish parties whose leaders dominated the drafting of the constitution, was stealing the election.
[…]
“I believe they will rig the results and announce the success of the referendum, but our monitors reported to us that more than 80 percent of the voters in three governorates have said no to this draft,” Saleh Mutlaq, a spokesman for the Sunnis’ National Dialogue Council, told reporters at a news conference; Iraq’s provinces are formally called governorates. “This constitution is a menace to the unity and stability of Iraq, and we shall have no legal or legitimate means in order to defeat it.” (emphasis added)

That the perception of complete Sunni political marginalization is correct was underscored by statements made by triumphalist Shiite politicians like this one:

Shiite leaders said the Sunni Muslims wouldn’t win enough seats in the next Assembly to make major changes to the document next year. The document will remain largely the same when voted on again.

“The changes made (this week) on the permanent constitution were not very radical,” said Saad Jawad Khandeel of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a powerful Shiite political party. “Changes are normal, but I do not expect big changes” next year.

Those perpetual “bullets into ballots” cheerleaders of Bush’s “democracy spreading” agenda crowing that the Sunni vote shows they’ve been lured into the “political process” in Iraq by the constitutional bait, might do well to consider that the Sunni hope of having a voice in Iraqi politics has just been crushed. How they react to this proof of their subjection is yet to be seen.

UPDATE: Chris crunches the numbers being reported from Ninevah province and comes up with some very odd results.

UPDATE: AP REPORTING: The names of each province is followed by its capital in parentheses. No information was available from Baghdad province; the southern province of Babil; the northern Kurdish provinces of Dahuk, Suleimaniyah and Irbil; and the central province of Salahuddin.

In some cases, elections officials gave only rounded figures.

West-Central Iraq:

ANBAR (Ramadi):

Figures only from the area of the city of Fallujah. Turnout in other parts of Anbar province believed to be minimal, and results not known.

_ Yes: 3 percent.

_ No: 97 percent.

_ Votes counted: All 100,000 votes from Fallujah counted. (Turnout of 77 percent in Fallujah. )

DIYALA (Baqouba)

_ Yes: 280,000 (70 percent)

_ No: 80,000 (20 percent)

_ Disqualified votes: 40,000 (10 percent)

_ Votes counted: All 400,000 votes counted. (57 percent turnout)

NINEVAH (Mosul)

_ Yes: 326,774, (78 percent)

_ No: 90,065, (21 percent)

_ Disqualified votes: 2,965 (less than 1 percent)

_ Votes counted: 419,804 votes, from 475 of the 500 polling stations counted so far. (Turnout percentage unknown.)

TAMIM (Kirkuk)

_ Yes: 341,611 (63 percent)

_ No: 195,725 (36 percent)

_ Disqualified votes: 5,420 (1 percent)

_ Votes counted: All 542,000 votes counted. (78 percent turnout).

Southern Iraq:

BASRA (Basra)

_ Yes: 640,200. (97 percent)

_ No: 19,800. (3 percent)

_ Votes counted: All 660,000 votes counted. (64 percent turnout).

DHI QAR (Nasiriyah)

_ Yes: 415,000 (90 percent)

_ No: 46,000 (10 percent)

_ All 461,000 votes counted. (54 percent turnout)

KARBALA (Karbala)

_ Yes: 417,715 (95 percent).

_ No: 21,985 (5 percent).

_ Votes counted: All 439,700 votes counted. (60 percent turnout.)

WASIT (Kut)

_ Yes: 494,950. (95 percent)

_ No: 26,050. (5 percent)

_ All 521,000 votes counted.(54 percent turnout).

Four southern provinces where only the turnout was known, as reported by Carina Perelli, the U.N. elections chief:

NAJAF (Najaf): 56 percent.

MUTHANNA (Samawah): 58 percent turnout

MAYSAN (Amarah): 57 percent turnout

QADISIYAH Diwaniyah): 56 percent turnout.

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UPDATE: Citing AFP and Reuters, this report appears in The Daily Star:

The Sunni Arab dominated province of Salaheddin has voted by 71 percent against Iraq’s draft constitution according to preliminary results reported Sunday by the chief provincial election officer.

“Seventy-one percent of voters in Salaheddin province voted ‘no’ to the Iraqi constitution,” Saleh Khalil Farraj told AFP.

“These are the initial results, they are not final. They must be fine-tuned and we will announce the official figure at 5:00 pm (1400 GMT),” he said.

Eighty-eight percent of all registered voters in Salaheddin had cast ballots, the official added.

In the city of Samarra, 95 percent of voters rejected the draft charter for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, while three percent approved.

Results from all four Sunni-dominated provinces, Diyala, Salaheddin, Al-Anbar and Nineveh, are crucial because the constitution would be rejected if two-thirds of Iraqis vote ‘no’ in at least three of the country’s 18 provinces.

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Chris Albritton has a post up about the Iraqi referendum, which begins, “BAGHDAD — Well, well… The Sunnis might surprise us all on this one.”

The absolute worst-case scenario is if the Sunnis come close to defeating the constitution, but fail. There will be accusations of vote-rigging and any political momentum the Sunnis felt was moving their way will be spent. The Shi’ites will have consolidated their power and those Sunnis on the fence might be moved into active opposition. The insurgency might even worsen, if such things are possible, or a close vote might be the trigger for open civil war.

So, it will definitely be interesting to watch the results come in. So far, we’re hearing nothing but rumors. They range from the intriguing — I heard that the polling stations in the Green Zone, the seat the Iraqi Government, went overwhelmingly against the constitution; make of that what you will — to the absurd: Al-Firat, an Iranian channel, is reporting that instead of voting “no,” Salahadin province, containing Tikrit, voted 75 percent in favor of the constitution. If that result turns out to be true, there will be no doubt the vote was fixed, and in a stupidly clumsy manner.

I do think that defeating the constitution might be best in the long run. It will embolden the Sunnis and give them a political win, motivating them to further involve themselves in the political process. This will force the Shi’ites and Kurds to deal with real elected representatives instead of appointed ones. Will this spell and end to violence? Of course not, but anything that allows the Sunnis to claim victory instead of forcing them to eat political table scraps is a big step in ending the Sunni-led insurgency.

“Mushroom Cloud” Rice , who should know as she is in Europe today, is saying the constitution “appears” to have passed. “There’s a belief that it has probably passed,” Rice told reporters. The same Washington Post article says,

News services from Baghdad reported Sunday that early returns suggested large numbers of voters rejected the constitution in the Sunni strongholds of Anbar and Salahuddin provinces. But according to initial results, Sunni voters may not have been able to reach the two-thirds threshold in Diyala province east of Baghdad or in Nineveh province in the north, where Sunnis also have large representation.

America’s top diplomat praised Iraqi police and security forces who deserved “a lot of credit” for the peaceful voting day, which will probably confuse the families of the five US soldiers killed in Ramadi yesterday.

Today in Iraq has a survey of all the media coverage thus far.