Iraqi Elections Coming Up.

The people of Iraq will be going to the polls at the end of the month in elections set up by the United States. It will be interesting to see how the elections go. How much the US will interfere with the process will probably never be known, since it\'s in the American\'s best interest to have someone who is very pro-US in charge. Someone who will do America\'s bidding in the region. With that in mind, here are my predictions for the election. Iyad Allawi, the interim Iraqi prime minister, who is pro-US will be installed as Iraqi president. One of two things will cause this to happen. He could actually be elected. Iraq is a relatively secular state for an Arab country, Allawi is a secular leader. This means that secular Iraqis are likely to vote for him over more religious based candidates.

The second way is that even if he loses the election, the Americans will not likely like a religious government in Iraq, so will find some irregularity in the voting (highly likely given the volatility of the country at the moment) to use as an excuse to declare the elections null and void and install Allawi as interim president until more “fair” elections can be held.

Either way, the US is likely to be in Iraq for years to come. The insurgents (as the US calls them, I\'m sure they prefer to call themselves resistance or freedom fighters) will not go away after the election. Being a guerrilla war, the insurgents have the advantage. They know the terrain better than the Americans, they can come and go as they please since they can blend into the population. They have some measure of popular support amongst the Iraqi citizenry. They will be a destabilizing force in Iraq for years and no amount of US military might will rid the country of them, just like they were unable to win a guerrilla war in Vietnam and just like Vietnam, the US will send thousands of troops and spend billions of dollars in Iraq in a futile attempt to control the guerrillas. So with the US in Iraq, they will call the shots, not some local president who\'ll end up a mere puppet of Washington.