ELECTIONS, ELECTIONS

The dates of elections have a way of creeping up on you, suddenly. It's only just over 50 days to the US presidential election. It's only four months to the Iraqi election which is intended to create a representative parliamentary assembly to oversee the finalisation of the Iraqi constitution drafted last June and prepare further voting for an elected government. No date has been set but the deadline is the end of January. Can the United States military and the interim government of Dr Ayad Allawi get Iraq into the state of peace which is a prerequisite of any election anywhere? In reality they have less than four months to do it because electoral rolls have to be established and all the necessary infrastructure put in place for the voting. It seems an impossible task because there are important cities and other large areas in Iraq which are not under the control of the interim government or the American military. Substantial sectors of Baghdad come under this description, as do the towns of the Sunni triangle, once Saddam Hussein's stronghold; in southern Iraq, Basra and some other towns are vulnerable to militia control. Whatever may be done to get more Iraqis trained for military and security duties, the fact remains that it is only the United States Army which can make a significant difference to the situation on the ground in the short-term. And it finds itself in the classic guerrilla war dilemma that the harder it hits at the militias the more harm it will do to innocent civilians. Last Sunday's event, when a single suicide bomber's attack led to US retaliation that killed 15 civilians, among them a TV reporter, and wounded 50 more, demonstrated the point only too clearly. ow.