I don't really believe that a perfectly clean and a highly participatory election is absolutely vital for Iraq to turn a corner and begin some semblance of a peaceful, normal society. Nevertheless, the standards being deemed necessary by US government officials are quite laughable.
"I would ... really encourage people not to focus on numbers, which in themselves don't have any meaning, but to look on the outcome and to look at the government that will be the product of these elections," a senior administration official said.
Do you understand that first comment? "- "encourage people not to focus on numbers, which in themselves don't have any meaning," What the hell are they trying to say? I suppose if I said 45, 5 and 612 without adding anything further, these numbers "in themselves don't have any meaning." But if these numbers stood for, oh perhaps, the overall percentage of Iraqis voting, the percentage of Sunnis voting and the number of Iraqis killed on election day, then these numbers most definitely would mean something. The logic here seems to imply that anything simply called an election and producing an outcome is valid regardless of the manner in which the election was carried out or who participated in that election (though I still don't quite get how the lack of focusing on numbers entirely fits in)
From the same story
The official highlighted the low voter turnout in U.S. elections as evidence that polling numbers are not essential to legitimacy.
The only numbers which really concern the official are the ones that will surely portray an election where a very significant portion do not vote. One, of course, could argue that simply because the much of the American public and certainly most of the mainstream media accept the idea that US presidential elections are legitimate even when barely half the population bothers to vote does not make it so. But I'll avoid that rather involved topic for the time being and just note how the government official really is comparing apples and orangoutangs.
To state the obvious, Iraq is in the middle of a war with one very significant portion of the population essentially boycotting the election. And to be sure, despite whatever arrangements made prior to the outcome, the Sunnis will not be satisfied in the upcoming Shiite cakewalk to victory. Further many believe the mere presence of a foreign army without international legitimacy and in complete charge of all military and security operations in the country makes a fair result impossible.
In the end it won't be the American public nor the cowering mainstream media who'll determine the legitimacy of the election. It will be the Iraqis and if they're not participating it's hard to see how they will view the whole process as legitimate, especially as they witness the new government as equally dependent on US forces for security as the old one.
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