{"id":1742,"date":"2005-01-31T08:49:10","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T15:49:10","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2005-01-31T08:49:10","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T15:49:10","slug":"beyond-the-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/31\/beyond-the-hype\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Getting beyond all the self-congratulatory hype in the American media, the London <i>Independent<\/i> offers <a href=\"http:\/\/news.independent.co.uk\/world\/middle_east\/story.jsp?story=606210\">this perspective from Iraq<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Americans have repeatedly charged that Iran was interfering in the election and bankrolling Shia Islamist parties such as Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) &#8211; both part of the Sistani list &#8211; with $20m (\u00a310.6m). Waleed Ketan of the Iraqi National Accord, a secular party, claimed that Syed al-Battat, the man running the poll in the south for the Independent Electoral Commission for Iraq, had been a member of SCIRI and most of the election station managers in Basra were SCIRI sympathisers.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;&#8216;The list with SCIRI has a chance of winning because they have taken over the polling stations,&#8217; he said. &#8216;If that happens I shall leave the country, I do not want to live in an Islamist state.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Some voters were more sceptical. Moqtada Ali Riadh, 53, an engineer, said: &#8216;I am voting for List 169, and I fought in the war against Iran. This is Iraq, not Iran. What the Americans are saying is just to divide the people. We should take no notice.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Others insist that the elections are a sham. Hazim Abed Allakif, the head of the students&#8217; union at Basra University, said &#8216;People standing at the elections can only do so with the permission of the US and Britain. We regard them as agents. These are not free elections.'&#8221; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Getting beyond all the self-congratulatory hype in the American media, the London Independent offers this perspective from Iraq: &#8220;The Americans have repeatedly charged that Iran was interfering in the election and bankrolling Shia Islamist parties such as Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) &#8211; both part of the Sistani list [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}