Dystopic Fantasyland

The fantasyland side of this story is the insistance that elections in Iraq will be held January 30th, in spite of, well, the fact that were talking about a place where conditions would have to improve before anyone could even say that things are seriously fucked up. I mean, c'mon--up in Mosul, three quarters of the "cops" either bolted or joined the resistance. After reading this story, it's not real difficult to see why:

"Take them over there and kill them," the leader said.

His gunmen hauled three men out of their car, bound their hands behind their backs and lined them up by the side of the road. They shot them in the chest. There was no hesitation, just a series of bursts from two Kalashnikovs...

The men..it turned out, had been a policeman and two National Guards...

It was in the trunk...that the armed band found what they were looking for -- two Iraqi National Guard and one police uniform.

Too afraid to wear them, the men in the car in front had hoped to pass for civilians. But the uniforms gave them away.

Iraq's fledgling security forces bear the brunt of attacks by insurgents bent on overthrowing the U.S.-backed government.

Police have become such targets that many switch their uniforms for civilian clothes before going home at night. National Guards don balaclavas with their uniforms and keep their jobs secret from neighbours for fear of reprisal.

Sounds like a wonderful climate in which to begin an election campaign, no?

Mosul has seen offices of Kurdish political parties ransacked, a warehouse containing voter registration forms was burned, Fallujah has all the looks of an even more Palestinian-style hellhole than the rest of Iraq (which itself is doing a pretty good job when it comes to resembling the Occupied Territories)--and they're scheduling an election?

That's like scheduling a beauty pageant in the midst of a train wreck.

A popular expression in Iraq these days is "Ya Allawi, ya jaban. Ya 'ameel al-Amercaan. Sheel idak, sheel idak. Hatha shaabak mai reedak!" Roughly translated, it means that Iyad Allawi a coward, an American puppet, and should, in the words of this writer, make himself scarce (why do I get the feeling the writer is being, um, diplomatic?).

Elections? Ha. It'd be a miracle if the interim government could simply get a somewhat working civil society.