Remember Fallujah ... Bomb Ramadi !!!!!

The Iraq Higher Electoral Commission has been provoked to conduct investigation into voting patterns and results. Official results are not expected for “several days”. In six Shiite-majority provinces in the South, 95 percent or more of voters are reported voting for the constitution.

The provinces affected seem largely to be in the hands of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose enthusiasm for the new voting process that accompanies a truly representative democracy, may have overrun the norms and standards practised in Western, so called Democracies. Without Diebold voting machines as well.

Sunni Arab leaders warned of serious consequences if fraud were proved with regard to the vote in Ninevah where the Sunni vote may have been accidentally miscounted , although in Anbar and Salahuddin the constitution has reportedly been rejected by a the required 66% majority.

As predicted, it seems likely that these three Sunni Arab - majority provinces have rejected the constitution, even if not by the margin required to defeat it – to those who relish these things – the worst possible outcome.

Mired in the outcome of the Plame blame game, Washington’s dwindling band of palaeocons talk up the very fact that Sunnis have voted..no doubt they would have seen votes for Hitler in 1933, or those who kept Milosevic aloft in Serbia as carrying forward the balm of democracy - it is difficult to imagine their view of the voters for hard liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.

Curiously, no-one in the Coalition of the almost Willing suggested that the voting was subject to International scrutiny, as in Georgia, Ukraine, etc.,

Meanwhile …
5 US grunts were killed at Ramadi over the weekend, where the referendum was largely ignored. So US F18 airstrikes and helicopter gunships attacks were ordered on Monday , pulverising residential areas, killing 70 people, including at least 20 civilians, 5 of them young children.

CNN reports

"We do careful targeting to ensure minimum civilian casualties in the areas that the insurgents are operating," said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, director of the U.S.-led Combined Press Information Center.

In Washington POTUS told a Press Conference, he praised the turnout, calling it "an indication that the Iraqi people are strongly in favor of settling disputes in a peaceful way; that they understand that working to find common ground in a constitution is much better for their future than relying upon killers and people who will kill innocent children and women for the sake of creating havoc."

I couldn’t say it better…

Recent blogs on same topic here