The number of voters and the relative absence of disruptions were another feather in the cap of Washington and its allies toward the goal of establishing a government subservient to U.S. imperialist interests in the region.

As expected, turnout was largest in the Shiite-populated provinces in the south and the Kurdish provinces in northeastern Iraq. Shiites make up some 60 percent of the Iraqi population and Kurds about 20 percent. Leaders from both population groups were subjected historically to brutal repression by a ruling caste that had been dominated by individuals among the Arab Sunni minority. Wealthy Sunnis were the backbone of support for the Hussein regime.

The turnout was reportedly low in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad but higher than expected in Mosul, which remains dominated by Sunnis.

One of the unforeseen results of the voting was the extent to which Iraqi Kurds took advantage of the elections to advance their campaign for greater autonomy for the Kurdish region. Kurdish groups set up tents near polling stations in those areas and asked Kurds to cast a ballot in an unofficial referendum on independence, with widespread success.

This turn of events did not please Washington, London, and most governments in the region. Turkish government and military officials in Ankara had charged that Kurds were using the election campaign to establish control over Iraq’s oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gull, said Ankara would not sit idly by while Kurds took over Kirkuk, according to Agence France-Press.

The 240 polling sites in Najaf, which is considered the capital of the largely Shiite southern Iraq, swarmed with voters, according to a January 30 Reuters dispatch. Iraqi election officials estimated the turnout among Shiites would reach 85 percent, the January 31 New York Times reported. Most voters in Najaf, as well as most other Shiite cities, cast their ballots for the United Iraqi Alliance, a slate backed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s leading Shiite cleric. The Financial Times placed the turnout in the majority-Shiite city of Basra at 70 percent.

The United Iraqi Alliance slate includes the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Leaders of the group, who returned from exile in Iran following the overthrow of Hussein by the U.S. military, say the new government in Iraq will be secular not “Islamic.”  
 
Low turnout among Sunnis
Fareed Ayar, chairman of the Iraqi election commission, and Carlos Valenzuela, the United Nations election advisor in the country, said voting was higher than expected in Babil, Anbar, Diyala, and Nineveh provinces. They also said there were lines in Baquba, Mosul, and Fallujah—all part of the Sunni Triangle, reported the February 1 New York Times. The Chinese news agency Xinhua said voters turned out at eight polling stations in Fallujah but the number of votes remained unknown.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, however, that there was little voting in the Sunni Triangle with few polling stations open. The report described the streets of Fallujah as “desolate.” U.S. Marines along with British and Iraqi troops routed Baathist irregulars from their stronghold in Fallujah last November. Only a small portion of the city’s former population of 250,000 has been allowed to return there since its takeover by U.S. occupation forces. While the Iraqi government claimed 60,000 have returned, the UN refugee agency says only 8,500 have come back and decided to stay.

According to the Washington Post, only six people voted in nearby Ramadi—the provincial governor, three of his deputies, the police chief, and a representative of the Iraqi Communist Party.

In Samarra, which U.S. forces retook from the Baathists last October, the head of the city council said there would be no voting out of concern for security, AFP reported.

Ayar said voter turnout in Barquba, which has a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, was 30 percent.

Turnout was higher than expected in Mosul, which has been the center of Baathist attacks since those forces were routed from Fallujah. In the two weeks before the elections, U.S. troop strength in and around the city was increased from 8,000 to 12,000. Another 4,500 Iraqi policemen and military personnel had been dispatched there too, according to the Washington Post.

The turnout in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad was also higher than expected, including in Adhamiyah where Hussein was last seen being cheered by crowds just before he fled the presidential palace.

A CBS News report cited a “steady stream” of voters in the “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad. The area includes Shiites and Sunnis. But in Jurf as Sakhr, a Sunni town in the area, voters were directed to cast their ballots elsewhere as the government was not able to recruit any polling workers and the U.S. military had difficulty finding Iraqi contractors who would deliver bomb barriers.  
 
Relatively minor bloodshed
A pledge by Baathists to “wash the streets with the blood of voters” did not materialize. According to press reports, 45 people were killed, including nine suicide bombers from the group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi called “Al-Qaeda in Iraq.” This registered the growing isolation of the Baathists and the progress the U.S. military is making in slowly dismantling their forces. Two days before the elections, the Iraqi government announced the capture of three alleged top aides to al-Zarqawi, bringing the total to six leaders of the group reportedly captured in recent months.

In a crackdown leading up to the vote, security forces of the Iraqi interim regime arrested 200 suspected Baathists and their supporters. The majority of them, 129, were from the northern city of Tikrit, which is also Hussein’s hometown. Those arrested included two Saudis, an Egyptian, and a Yemeni, reported Reuters, but most were Iraqis.  
 
Bipartisan support for war solidifies
U.S. president George Bush and his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, were measured in their descriptions of the election results. Recalling the central theme of his inaugural address, Bush said, “The world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East.”

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week” TV show January 30 as early reports came in from Iraq, Rice said the election is going “better than could have been expected.” Asked whether the election results would lead to the beginning of a reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq, Rice said there is no timetable. She added that Washington would focus now on training Iraqi troops and having the “right combination” of U.S. and Iraqi forces.

John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, downplayed the importance of the impact of the Iraqi elections. “I think it’s gone as expected,” he told the press. Asked by Tim Russert, the host of NBC TV’s “Meet The Press,” whether he agreed with a call by Sen. Edward Kennedy for a rapid timetable to withdraw U.S. troops, Kerry answered no, twice. He said that “security and stability” must be provided before turning Iraq over to the Iraqis. Kerry said he would most likely vote in favor of the administration’s request for $80 billion in supplemental funding for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senate minority leader Harry Reid called the elections a “milestone,” adding that “an exit strategy” is needed. In a joint press conference with House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, however, Reid took a stance similar to most other Democratic Party politicians. “As far as setting a timeline, as we learned in the Balkans, that’s not a wise decision, because it only empowers those who don’t want us there, and it doesn’t work well to do that,” Reid said.

“Even if things go extremely well, the next months will be fraught with tensions, making this exactly the wrong moment for the United States to be setting fixed troop-withdrawal targets, as some Democrats now propose,” said the lead editorial in the February 2 New York Times, a paper that campaigned vigorously for Kerry’s presidential bid and has continued to criticize the Bush administration’s course in Iraq. “For the first time in this whole sorry enterprise, it now seems possible to imagine an acceptable political outcome.”

Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Blair, said the elections were a “blow to the heart of global terrorism,” reported the BBC. Just weeks before the election, London dispatched a 600-strong battalion to reinforce its troops in southern Iraq. As many as 10 British soldiers were killed in a crash of a C-130 transport the day of the vote, which was seized by the British government and press to advance their patriotic pro-war campaign. Al-Jazeera broadcast a video tape in which a group calling itself “the 1920 Revolution Brigade” of the National Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed to have shot down the plane.

Approval of the outcome of the elections came from imperialist governments and other regimes that have criticized the Bush administration’s course in the region, including many regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia.

French president Jacques Chirac, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and Russian president Vladimir Putin—each of whom criticized the U.S.-led assault on Iraq in 2003—expressed satisfaction with the election results, according to the January 31 New York Times.

Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, an Iranian government spokesperson, said the elections were “held freely” but under “difficult circumstances,” the Times said.

The day before the elections, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak said U.S.-led troops should remain in Iraq after the January 30 vote in order to prevent the outbreak of civil war, the Associated Press reported.  
 
Kurds press to bolster autonomy
At the same time, one development on election day worried Washington and its imperialist allies and most regimes in the region: what the Kurds did.

Turnout among Kurds in northeastern Iraq, also known as Iraqi Kurdistan, was also high, about 80 percent, reported AFP. The main Kurdish parties—the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan—ran on a single slate in order to maximize the number of Kurds elected to the national assembly that will write the new constitution. Most Kurds are seeking to bolster the limited autonomy they have enjoyed in Iraqi Kurdistan since the early 1990s, under the protection of U.S. and British forces that imposed a no-fly zone in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.

In tents set up outside polling centers—with the approval of the Kurdish regional government—members of the Kurdish Referendum Movement conducted an “unofficial vote” on independence, reported the Washington Post. The group handed out more than 2 million forms asking voters if they wanted an independent Kurdistan, said AFP. Last December, the group handed the chief UN elections official in Iraq a petition asking for a referendum on Kurdish independence. It was signed by more than 1.7 million Kurds, almost half the adult Kurdish population in northern Iraq.

A representative for the Kurdish slate said the electoral coalition was leading the vote in Kirkuk. Leaders of the Kurdish regional government have stated their desire to take over the city, which so far Washington has opposed. Thousands of Kurds were forcibly removed from the town and surrounding region by the Hussein regime, which settled Sunni Arabs in their place in order to consolidate control of the oil-rich region. Thousands of Kurds have resettled in the area, reportedly displacing more than 100,000 Arabs.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gull, said the situation in Kirkuk “has reached dangerous proportions.” The chief of staff of Turkey’s military, Gen. Ilker Basburg, denounced “hundreds of thousands of Kurds who have migrated to Kirkuk to register to vote,” according to Al-Jazeera TV.

Together with another 20 million Kurds living in a territory that covers parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Armenia, the Iraqi Kurds make up an oppressed nation first subjugated by the Ottoman empire. Baghdad, Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus fear that any move toward independence, or even formal autonomy, by Iraqi Kurds could be a mortal threat to their regimes as it would inspire national struggles among their Kurdish populations.
 
 
Related articles:
The unintended effects of the Iraq war
British soldiers tried for systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Basra  
 
 
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