17 Days to Iraq's Elections

Car bombs are on the rise:

Vehicles packed with explosives, often detonated by suicide attackers, have become one of the insurgency's most lethal weapons. An Associated Press tally shows there have been at least 181 of them since Iraq's interim government took over June 28 -- just a handful at first but surging to a rate of one or more a day in recent months.

Those bombs killed about 1,000 people, Iraqis and Americans, and wounded twice as many. The tally found that 68 bombings were suicide attacks and the rest were detonated by other means.

The administration peddles the soft bigotry of low expectations:

With just over two weeks until the Iraqi elections, the United States is lowering its expectations for both the turnout and the results of the vote, increasingly emphasizing other steps over the next year as more important to Iraq's political transformation, according to U.S. officials.

The Bush administration played down voter turnout yesterday in determining the elections' legitimacy and urged Americans not to get bogged in a numbers game in judging the balloting, a reflection of the growing concern over how much the escalating insurgency and the problem of Sunni participation may affect the vote.

Fraud? Well...

Further, the administration acknowledged that no mechanism has been devised yet to prevent fraud such as multiple voting.

And for all the talk about how the election will help put an end to the insurgency, the government has now decided to put the import on (you guessed it) a different election. So how will this one help stop the insurgency again?