The Daily Background

A week later.

AMERICAblog has a short piece on the recent Iraqi Parliamentary elections which transpired last week. Discussed are complaints of vote fraud.

Robert Dreyfuss also has a piece over at TomPaine, which begins thusly:

The last hope for peace in Iraq was stomped to death this week. The victory of the Shiite religious coalition in the December 15 election hands power for the next four years to a fanatical band of fundamentalist Shiite parties backed by Iran, above all to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Quietly backed by His Malevolence, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, sustained by a 20,000-strong paramilitary force called the Badr Brigade, and with both overt and covert support from Iran’s intelligence service and its Revolutionary Guard corps, SCIRI will create a theocratic bastion state in its southern Iraqi fiefdom and use its power in Baghdad to rule what’s left of the Iraqi state by force.

You can read the full column here

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog