The international investigation team that came to Iraq to check on election results announced that they are delaying the announcement of their report until Thursday.
The interesting thing about this is that the team said they’d disclose their report after the team members leave Iraq! This suggests that the team wants to avoid upsetting any particular Iraqi party while they are still here.
Parties that opposed the preliminary results such as Maram have high hopes on this report; not because they think it can grant them more seats in the parliament as everyone knows now that final results won’t be much different from the preliminary ones but rather because those parties want something that officially proves fraud has taken place regardless of the size of this fraud. It’s just the mere idea that any proven fraud will give Maram and the like more bargaining power to face the UIA with and they think that then, the UIA will not be able to force its point of view regarding the formation of the government and thus will have to reach a compromise with the others and give them a better share. ...
Read the rest at the link. Mohammed also points out that the greatest danger in Iraq is not the increasingly fragmented and isolated al-Qaeda but "the possible interference of the neighbors in Iraq’s internal affairs to destabilize the country and impede the political process". The Syrian and Iranian regimes have an interest in making Iraq look like a quagmire because, they reason, as long as Washington perceives itself as being "bogged down" in Iraq, the regimes in Tehran and Damascus are safe.
I'm hoping they've miscalculated.
