Voting Amid Mayhem

The deadly aftermath of last week’s tsunami in Asia temporarily shifted attention away from Iraq. The news from the Middle East, however, has been bad and getting worse.

Yesterday, 25 people were killed in insurgent attacks. Twenty were killed and 25 wounded when a car exploded outside a police academy in Hilla, south of Baghdad. A suicide car bomber killed five Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint in Baquba and a bomb aimed at a U.S. military convoy killed two Iraqi citizens in Baghdad.

The day before, the governor of Baghdad was assassinated and six of his bodyguards killed when gunmen attacked their convoy. A truck packed with explosives detonated near an Interior Ministry headquarters, killing 10 people and wounding about 60. Five U.S. soldiers were killed in three separate attacks.

On Monday, 20 people were killed in insurgent attacks.

Faced with mounting evidence of their strength, the director of Iraq’s intelligence services said he believes the insurgents now outnumber U.S. forces in the country. Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani said the insurgents likely number 200,000.

This is far more than the 5,000 resistance fighters U.S. officials long claimed were in the country. Despite claims of killing more than 5,000 such fighters, U.S. officials refused to increase their estimates of the number of insurgents in Iraq until June 2004. Then the number was boosted to 20,000 and stayed there for months.

Mr. Shahwani said there were at least 40,000 hard-core fighters backed up by part-time guerrillas and others providing information, logistical support and funding.

“People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something,” he told the Times of London.

His assessment echoed a recently released report on the Iraqi insurgency by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The United States … was slow to react to the growth of the insurgency in Iraq, to admit it was largely domestic in character and to admit it had significant popular support,” Mr. Cordesman wrote last month.

“It largely ignored the warnings provided by Iraqi opinion polls and claimed that its political, economic and security efforts were either successful or would soon become so,” the former Pentagon official added. “In short, it failed to honestly assess the facts on the ground in a manner reminiscent of Vietnam.”

These grim assessments come less than a month before Iraqis are supposed to go to the polls to elect their legislature. Insurgents are determined to undermine and disrupt the elections. Still, it is unclear what U.S. and Iraqi officials plan to do to minimize the dangers to the millions of Iraqi citizens who may vote.

A modest, but wise, suggestion comes from Maine Sen. Susan Collins. “I believe that the Iraqi elections should proceed, but that they should be held over a number of days to make it more difficult for terrorists to target polling places on a single day,” she said. “If the elections were canceled altogether, it would be a victory for violence over democracy, and we cannot allow that to happen.”

U.S. officials say that impediments can be overcome and that as many voting places as possible will be open, with some moved to easily defensible locations if necessary. Such vague responses are only partially reassuring given the daily bombings and attacks.