Iraq elections

They will happen on schedule. There's really not that much left to do:

Farid Ayar, a member of the eight-member Independent Electoral Commission, said recently that the commission has just begun recruiting the 70,000 workers needed to hold the elections. And it still hasn't sent out forms to families to determine who lives in each household and whether they can vote.

Nor has the committee determined how citizens can declare their candidacies or whether the committee will provide them with campaign funds.

Most citizens, Ayar said, don't even know how to vote.

"We are trying to tell people about the elections through the media," he said.

Several major factions have also refused to participate in the election process, citing U.S. interference, unfair alliances and poor representation of certain ethnic groups.

That's sarcasm folks. They have no idea who is eligible to vote. They don't know how to vote or what it means. Major factions don't want to participate.

Flawed elections aren't better than nothing in this case. People already have an excuse to doubt Allawi as their leader. Flawed and partial elections won't legitimize his rule. Look at Bush here in America. Flawed elections helped divide this country to the partisan sniping we engage in today. I'm just glad we don't live in the land of sporadic gun violence and IEDs that they have in Iraq.

Postponing the elections doesn't show the terrorists they won, it shows them we are serious about having elections and democracy in Iraq. It will show them how serious we are about rooting them out and destroying them, and it will show the people how serious this thing called democracy is. Anything short of that will no doubt fail.

*UPDATE*
Don't believe me? Ask the King of Jordan, ally to the U.S. in the Middle East:

Jordan's King Abdullah has said it will be impossible to hold fair elections in Iraq in the current state of chaos.
He told the French newspaper Le Figaro that only extremists would gain if the elections went ahead in January without the security situation improving.

(snip)

He said he was worried that partial elections excluding troubled areas such as Fallujah could isolate Sunni Arab Iraqis and create deeper divisions within the country.

"It seems impossible to me to organise indisputable elections in the chaos we see today," the king said.