The leftward and other blatherings of Span (now with Snaps!)

Sunday, September 26, 2004

even worse than i thought

Over at No Right Turn, I/S has a pretty damn scary map of the fighting in Iraq.

this raises a very serious question - how on earth are there going to be "free and fair" elections in January 2005??? there's only October, November and December between now and January. and that's a whole heap of trouble that is not going to make Iraq's first go at real democracy in a very long time (ever?) any easier.

i see the Bush administration has started preparing the ground for elections in "three-quarters" or "four-fifths" of Iraq. that picture shows the reality is more the reverse - they'll be lucky if peace is secure enough to hold a vote in a quarter or a fifth unless there is a major change.

1 comment:

Span said...

true about the sand - but also I/S made a good point about how they are determining "peace" given that Baghdad is marked down as peaceful. it's true that we can't really know, statistics (and maps extrapolated from them) are torturously twistable things, sigh.