Good debate.
A couple of points.
1)Things probably seem worse than they are. The same worries were in force about elections in Afghanistan and it turned out OK. I also imagine Afghanistan had some extra challenges in getting their elections going compared to Iraq: lower literacy rate, less developed media and infrastructure to get the word out and people to the polls, etc.
2) I'm no expert in security but I'm confident securing discrete polling places is well within the capabilities of our forces.
3) We can count on improvised bombs and terrorists causing mischief throughout the next few years. (Heck, Israel saw bombs going of weekly and had no problems with doing an election). There is no ideal time to do this.
4) We announced the elections. You can guess that the election results will lead to all sorts of problems. But postponing the elections will lead to *certain* problems: loss of face and credibility we follow through, emboldening terrorists, emoboldening anti-American media, etc.
The elections must go on.
Excellant response. I was just thinking how impossible this debate--discussion--would be with a Liberal. I would get out one sentence and they would be screaming at me, " Halliburton! Halliburton!".ha.
well, I would only add this. What we may well get out of this election, is simply an iraqi government that has the legitimacy to fight a possible coming civil war. There is some benefit to that, but I worry that their ability to put together any kind of credible iraqi security forces to actually beat them back, is suspect.
I guess what I am saying is that right now, US public support for iraq is strong enough to sustain current operations - even if we had a 60 day election delay. What I fear is that a disastrous election, leading to civil war, is going to snap that public support - which would put the rag tag post-election iraqi government on the spot bigtime to clean it up. If they can't do it, the whole iraq effort is in trouble.