Allawi takes it

The offical election results were announced earlier tonight with Iraqiya taking 91 seats to Maliki’s State of Law party’s 89.  This is a good thing for the U.S. for several reasons:

• Allawi is an avowed secularist. Islamists will face strong oppostion from his government, as they did during American military battles against Sunni insurgents in Anbar during Allawi’s former term as PM.
• Allawi is viewed by the U.S. as placing more importance in training and development of Iraqi Army and Police, which he will likely use in a more severe manner against insurgents. This ought to lead to further improvements in the security situation in Iraq.
• Allawi formed a broad base of support that included Sunni groups, showing a promising ability to bridge the sectarian divide which has caused so many ongoing problems in Iraq.
• Allawi is anti-Iranian. Enough said there.

The U.S. feels it could work with either Maliki or Allawi, so even with Allawi being the favorite, a Maliki victory would not have meant a significant change to U.S. policy in Iraq. He’s been an increasingly good partner ever since his offensive in Basra in 2008. 

The U.S. was afraid of two things resulting from the election: a dramatic spike in violence and rampant fraud and illegitimacy of the election. Insurgent groups tried desperately to discredit the elections on March 7 through attacks, but their actions that day displayed just that–desperation. They lobbed mortars and set of a few IEDs in Baghdad to scare people away from the polls, but as the day went on and Iraqis saw how impotent the terrorists were, they turned out in great numbers. The number of violent attacks that day were less than an average day a few years ago. And by all objective accounts (U.S., U.N., other coalition observers) the elections were free and fair. This was reiterated again today by the UN and the U.S. Embassy. 

Another fear was that the tight security on election day led the insurgents to push their major attacks back to today–the announcement of the election results. Aside from a few explosions earlier in Diyala, there have been no attacks. As of the time of this writing, Baghdad has had no violence, other than much celebratory gunfire.

Today is another example of the progress the U.S. and it’s Iraqi partners have made in the last few years. Despite lingering pessimism, Iraq is moving steadily to the stable, U.S. friendly, democratic nation George W. Bush told us we would see.

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