Big turnout in Iraq

[ViolentPanda]

how in the name of God, Yahweh and Allah did you arrive at that particular notion?

Because the mears-bots' programming only allows him to address issues as one side of a binary opposition.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Another article on the voting. Note although this comes from antiwar.com the article originated from elsewhere. Worth the full read as its fairly complex in terms of numbers and places.....

Vote Figures for Crucial Province Don't Add Up

The early vote totals from Nineveh province, which suggested an overwhelming majority in favor of Iraq's draft constitution that assured its passage by national referendum, now appear to have been highly misleading.

The final official figures for the province, obtained by IPS from a U.S. official in Mosul, actually have the constitution being rejected by a fairly wide margin, but less than the two-thirds majority required to defeat it outright.

Both the initial figures and the new vote totals raise serious questions about the credibility of the reported results in Nineveh. A leading Sunni political figure has already charged that the Nineveh vote totals have been altered.

According to the widely cited preliminary figures announced by the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) in Nineveh, 326,000 people voted for the constitution and 90,000 against. Those figures were said to be based on results from more than 90 percent of the 300 polling stations in the province.

Relying on those "unofficial" figures, the media reported that the constitution appeared to have been passed – on the assumption that the Sunnis had failed to muster the necessary two-thirds "no" vote in Nineveh. No further results have been released by the IECI since then, and the final tally from the national referendum is not expected until Friday at the earliest.

However, according to the U.S. military liaison with the IECI in Nineveh, Maj. Jeffrey Houston, the final totals for the province were 424,491 "no" votes and 353,348 "yes" votes. This means that the earlier figures actually represented only 54 percent of the official vote total – not 90 percent, as the media had been led to believe. And the votes which had not been revealed earlier went against the constitution by a ratio more than 12 to 1.

These ballots could only have come from the Sunni sections of Mosul, a city of 1.7 million people. Although the votes from polling centers in those densely populated urban areas would take longer to count than those from more sparsely populated towns and cities outside Mosul, they should not have taken much longer than those for the Kurdish sections of Mosul.

Thus there seems to be no logistical reason for failing to announce the results for the 340,000 votes that went overwhelmingly against the constitution. Rather, the evidence suggests that it was a deliberate effort to mislead the media by Kurdish and Shi'ite political leaders who were intent on ensuring that the constitution would pass.

They knew that all eyes would be on Nineveh as the province where the referendum would be decided. By issuing figures that appeared to show that the vote in Nineveh was a runaway victory for the constitution, they not only shaped the main story line in the media that the constitution had already passed, but effectively discouraged any further media curiosity about the vote in that province.

The final figures revealed by the U.S. military liaison with the IECI suggest a voter turnout in Nineveh that strains credibility. On a day when Sunni turnout reached 88 percent in Salahuddin province and 90 percent in Fallujah, a total of only 778,000 votes – about 60 percent of the eligible voters – in Nineveh appears anomalous. Even if the turnout in the province had only been 70 percent, the total would have been 930,000.

 

[mears]

What a load of crap - they're quite reasonably concerned that certain parts of the constitution will mean revenues from the country will be unfairly distributed i.e. they'll get none. They've been lobbying to have it changed and every request knocked back. Democracy in action eh mears?

Right so they really have no choice but to attack Shia in hopes of plummeting the country into civil war. Than everything will be super.

Where is the Sunni constitution?

 

[mears]

I don't think the idea of a constitution is an intrinsically bad one, but this particular constitution is likely to cause more problems than it solves for a variety of reasons that I've already explained. Just to recap though ...

If you look at the successive drafts of the constitution, as analysed by FPIP What they actually got was a constitution that facilitated the privatisation of Iraq and as fast as the social provisions disappeared, provisions providing for Islamic law and partition were introduced, very likely in order to secure the agreement to privatisation of the pro-Iranian Shiites.

Strong majorities of the Iraqis themselves have clearly indicated that they don't want partitioning (see e.g. http://www.brookings.edu/iraqindex ), want the US/UK to leave either immediately or after the elections and think that the insurgents are fighting because US/UK is primarily there to steal their oil.

Under these circumstances, a consititution which just barely passes, amid loud accusations of vote-rigging is likely to make matters worse, not better.

Of course more cutting and pasting.

The constitution was not written by the Americans. It was a painstaking process played out by the Kurds and Shia, with some input by the Sunnis. At the very end more concessions were made to the Sunnis in hopes of garnering some of their support for the constitution. The Brookings institution may not like it, but they are not Iraqis.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> The Brookings institution may not like it, but they are not Iraqis.

If you actually read the Brookings thing I posted, it's a compilation of statistics and polling about Iraq. I was using it as a source suggesting that what Iraqis think is not what you want them to think.

 

[nino_savatte]

Of course more cutting and pasting.

The constitution was not written by the Americans. It was a painstaking process played out by the Kurds and Shia, with some input by the Sunnis. At the very end more concessions were made to the Sunnis in hopes of garnering some of their support for the constitution. The Brookings institution may not like it, but they are not Iraqis.

You're saying the US had no input in the constitution? My, you are not only naive but completely dishonest.

You can't win the argument so you resort to the tried and tested.

Of course more cutting and pasting.

All America all the crime.

 

[nino_savatte]

Right so they really have no choice but to attack Shia in hopes of plummeting the country into civil war. Than everything will be super.

Where is the Sunni constitution?

That's a rather simplistic view to take, mears, but not entirely unexpected for a troll.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Two provinces vote "no" according to the Beeb. Nineveh is yet to announce.

 

[Barking_Mad]

from Riverbends weblog

The referendum is only hours away and the final version of the constitution still hasn’t reached many people. Areas with a Sunni majority are complaining that there aren’t polling stations for kilometers around- many of these people don’t have cars and even if they did, what good would it do while there’s a curfew until Sunday? Polling stations should be easily accessible in every area.

This is like déjà vu from January when people in Mosul and other Sunni areas complained that they didn’t have centers to vote in or that their ballot boxes never made it to the counting stations.

American media is trying to make it sound like Sunnis have suddenly been mollified with the changes made in a flurry of covert meetings these last few days, but the reality is that the only Sunni party openly supporting the constitution is the Iraqi Islamic Party which represents a very, very small percentage of Sunnis.

Most educated Iraqis want to vote against the constitution. This makes the fact that Iraqis abroad aren’t being allowed to vote this time around worrisome. Why was it vital for them to vote for a temporary government back in January but it’s not necessary for them to contribute to this referendum which will presumably decide a permanent constitution for generations and generations of Iraqis? Could it be that the current Iranian inclined government knew that many Iraqis abroad didn’t like the constitution because of federalism, women’s rights, and the mention of no laws to be placed which contradict Islam?

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

 

[Bernie Gunther]

On the other hand the new constitution is in favour of free enterprise and opening up to foreign investment. So those voting against are probably un-american or something.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Constitution has passed, although quite what this will actually achieve I dont know........

Iraqis have passed their country's new constitution according to official results from the referendum which opposition leaders have dismissed.
Sunni "No" campaigners had hoped to block it by winning two-thirds of the vote in at least three provinces, in line with electoral rules. But they won in only two with the swing province of Nineveh returning 44% "Yes" votes, the official count shows. A bomb killed nine people in a Kurdish city as the result was being reported.

A second blast in the city of Sulaymaniyah, in the north-east, wounded two people travelling in the convoy of a senior Kurdish politician. In all, 78% of voters backed the charter and 21% opposed it in the vote on 15 October, electoral commission officials said. Approval of the constitution clears the way for elections to a new Iraqi parliament in December.

VOTE OVERVIEW
78% back charter, 21% reject
63% turnout
Majorities in 15 out of 18 provinces vote "Yes"
"No" vote majorities in two provinces - 96% reject constitution in Anbar, 81% in Salahuddin

No third province achieves required two-thirds majority to reject charter, though 55% vote "No" in Nineveh. Election official Farid Ayar described the vote as "100% correct" with "no cases of fraud that could affect the results of the vote".

The majority Shia community and Kurds strongly supported the constitution while the provinces where the poll was rejected by more than two-thirds of voters, Anbar and Salahuddin, are both strongly Sunni.

Sunni figures talked of widespread fraud after hearing the final results.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, part of a Sunni Arab team that negotiated the constitution, called the referendum a "farce" and accused government forces of stealing ballot boxes to reduce the size of the "No" vote.

A large body of Sunnis rejected a constitution they saw as enshrining their own loss of power and threatening the territorial unity of the country, BBC regional analyst Roger Hardy writes. To recover from the pain and division associated with the constitution, our analyst adds, continued Sunni participation in the political process is not enough: there must also be enlightened self-interest on the part of the newly-dominant Shia and Kurds. A senior United Nations official in Iraq, Carina Perelli, said the election had been conducted to the highest standard.

"It has been audited, controlled - it has been done really in a very professional way," she said.

"The result is accurate. It has been checked according to the processes that we all follow when we have elections."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4374822.stm

 

[oi2002]

Just as background. Interesting little piece on the dangers of Freedoms March in FA this month that reaches an interesting conclusion. A democratic Iraq might well behave like junkyard dog in the region:

... although mature democracies do not fight one another, democratizing states -- those in transition from authoritarianism to democracy -- do, and are even more prone to war than authoritarian regimes. Now, in Electing to fight, the authors have refined their argument. As they outline in the book, not only are "incomplete democratizing" states -- those that develop democratic institutions in the wrong order -- unlikely ever to complete the transition to democracy; they are also especially bellicose.
...
This brings the conversation back to Iraq, and in particular the notion that the United States can turn it into a democracy at an acceptable cost. In effect, Mansfield and Snyder have raised the estimate of these costs by pointing out one other reason this effort may fail -- a reason that few seem to have thought of. Forget for a moment the harrowing possibility of a Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish civil war in Iraq. Set aside the prospect of a Shiite-dominated state aligning itself with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon's Hezbollah. What if, following the departure of U.S. troops, Iraq holds together but as an incomplete democratizer, with broad suffrage but anemic state institutions? Such an Iraq might well treat its own citizens better than the Baathist regime did. Its treatment of its neighbors, however, might be just as bad.

Although Saddam was an unusually bellicose and reckless tyrant, attacking Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and engaging in foolish brinkmanship with the United States, as Mansfield and Snyder imply, a democratic Iraq may be no less bellicose and reckless. In the near future, intensely competitive elites there -- secularists, leftists, moderates, and both Shiite and Sunni Islamists -- could compete for popularity by stirring up nationalism against one or more of Iraq's neighbors. And Iraq lives in a dangerous neighborhood. Already, Iraqi Shiite parties have been critical of Sunni-dominated Jordan; Iraqi Sunni parties, of Shiite-dominated Iran; and Iraqi Kurdish parties, of Turkey.

One hopes that the White House contemplated this scenario prior to March 2003. Whether it did or not, the possibility must be considered now, by U.S. civilian and military leaders, academics, and U.S. allies who agree with those academics. If Mansfield and Snyder are correct about the bellicose tendencies of young, incompletely democratized states, the stakes of Iraq's transition are higher than most have supposed. They are high enough, in fact, that those who called so loudly in the 1990s for an end to UN sanctions because Iraqis were dying but who are silent about the Iraqis who are dying now ought to reconsider their proud aloofness from the war. An aggressive Iraq, prone to attack Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Israel, is in no one's interest. The odds may be long that Iraq will ever turn into a mature democracy of the sort envisaged by the Bush administration. But those odds are lengthened by the refusal of those states in Europe and the Middle East that could make a difference actually to do so.