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Opinion

Still time to reconsider Iraqi election date

Dante Eglin
The Daily Cougar

As the day draws nearer, the level of optimism in Washington continues to rise, while the bleak reality in Iraq grows more obvious. It seems the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections will occur, one way or another. The Bush administration's hard-line stance on executing the elections on the president's target date has essentially proven to be a naive and prideful example of policy overriding just cause.

A wave of five bombings occurred in Iraq on Jan. 19, the latest example of the increasingly frequent episodes of violence as the elections grow nearer. Sunni Muslim insurgents have vowed to stop the vote and threatened to halt the election procedures with non-violent tactics such as boycotts as well as more serious avenues like bombings and attacks. The Sunni minority, which lost privilege when the Saddam Hussein regime was ousted, has directed much of its attack toward the majority Shiites, who were the oppressed group during the Hussein era. The Shiites strongly support the vote, assuming it will vault their power and influence, as they are Iraq's majority group, making up about 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people.

The five bombings only serve to remind the world of the relentlessness of the insurgents and the increased acts of terror that will ultimately surface as the elections draw nearer. Our nation's leaders must realize the underlying effects of refusing to postpone the election procedures. The current administration feels the election is not war; it believes there is no "collateral damage" with continuing with the elections this month and is bent on supporting the president's ill-advised decision for the January elections.

There may not be "collateral damage" as in warfare, but too many innocents will suffer if the elections are not at least considered for postponement. At the most recent Shiite mosque bombing, a weeping man sat beside his dead teenage son and cried out "I had breakfast with him this morning. I told him, ‘Let's go to your grandfather,' but he insisted on going for prayers first." A woman in a black cloak was carried away by family members when she fainted after identifying her son's body in the hospital's morgue.

Adding to the difficulty of coping with inevitable violence is the mechanics of the voting procedure itself. About 12.5 million Iraqis are registered to vote, with 5,000 polling stations not available until election day. Iraq's election commission will be left to deal with the compounded issue of not only providing security to the voters but also protecting the vote tallies and preventing fraudulent counts.

Voters will be marked with ineffaceable ink to prevent multiple voting, yet that procedure also puts them at risk of retribution from rebels and insurgents, which could likely discourage possible voters from coming out to polling stations. 

"The Iraqis felt it was incredibly important that people realized there was not going to be multiple voting," Carlos Valenzuela, a Colombian who has helped run 14 elections in other parts of the world, told the Guardian newspaper. Valenzuela is an advisor for the Iraqi election process.

In addition to the ink, voters' names will be crossed off a list once they have cast their ballot, with the possibility that those lists could be obtained by insurgents as an avenue for deadly reprimand.

There is also the issue of whom the voters will choose on their ballots. 7,785 total candidates are established for election to the 275-seat national assembly. However, due to the increasing violence and security concerns, relatively few of those candidates have been publicly named. Prior to the vote, the election commission will reveal the full candidate list via the Iraqi press, meaning a large number of Iraqi citizens will simply choose any candidate at random due to lack of background information readily available.

Fresh off his $40 million dollar inauguration ceremony, it's officially a new term and a new beginning for President Bush and his administration. Now is the golden opportunity to avoid the type of uninformed and rushed judgments made concerning Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States needs to seriously evaluate and consider both the pros and cons of continuing with the Jan. 30 election date. The main concern is the well-being of the Iraqi people, not that of the special interests, the economy, foreign policy or anything else, and that concern alone is more important than meeting a deadline.
 

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