Early Returns in Iraq

"So far it's gone very well, much better than expected," said a U.S. officer, as small arms fire echoed in the distance.

That officer is in Mosul, "Mosul, Iraq's third largest city in the north of the country, where there is a mixed Sunni and Kurdish population and where the insurgency has been strong in recent months, U.S. officials said voting stations were busy and attacks were few."

Whole Reuters report here.

Comments

[Peter K.]

What is meant by "mixed Sunni and Kurdish population"? Most Kurds are Sunnis. "Sunni" is a religious affiliation; "Kurdish" is an ethnicity. This is like saying Quebec City has a "mixed Catholic and French-Canadian population".

[phocion]

What is meant by "mixed Sunni and Kurdish population"?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess they meant "mixed Sunni Arab and Kurdish population".

[Mr. X]

I know. It's sloppy wording. But more importantly, aside from the tension between Kurds and Arabs and between members of different Arab tribes, the fact that politics in Iraq largely revolves around which sect of Muslim fundamentalists will hold how much power disproves Bush's claims to have liberated Iraq.
Besides, the votes are counted by the Iraqi Interim Government, which only allows reporters to break the driving ban or go near the polls if the Iraqi government has previously accredited them, censors newspapers for its own political gain, has declared martial law over a large portion of the country, uses its ownership of the airwaves to keep those it disagrees with from getting favorable coverage and, of course, to give a disproportionate amount of coverage to Allawi's Iraqi List party. There are no American troops or other foreign observers present at the polls, nor will there be when the votes are counted. As Stalin once said, "He who controls the vote count controls the outcome." We'll never know how many seats in the Iraqi Parliament were filled by voters, how many will be filled by insurgents and terrorists skewing the supposed election by scaring people away from the polls, and how many were filled through vote count tampering.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Party at Mr. X's house!

[joe]

The celebrating seems a little strained, as if the hawks are determined to celebrate this as a great success, regardless of how the polling turns out, what the real turnout numbers are, and what happens from here.

I guess, given the way things have gone for the past couple of years, it's not surprising that they'll take what they can get. But I'm starting to detect a more sinister agenda: if they can define what happened yesterday as the great success that the war was meant to achieve, the coming storm can't be said to disprove their predictions, since no matter what happens, they achieved their great success.

And it was a GREAT success! Why, it was the greatest, most fantabulous success in the history of democracy! Waa-hoo! Mission Accomplished!

[Eric the .5b]

You know, I didn't support invading Iraq or having our troops die in order to free anyone. But I have to just say, "Way to smirk at millions of people defying threats of death in order to vote, Joe."

[Douglas Fletcher]

Don't mock joe, he's had a lot of snow to shovel the past couple of weeks.

Of course he does a lot of shoveling anyway so he was probably in shape for it.