Well, first of all, Chalabi's defeat couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy: "Preliminary results in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad indicate that Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress scored a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes. Out of almost 2.5 million voters in Baghdad, only 8,645 voted for Chalabi. In the Shiite city of Basra, the results indicate he had an equally dismal showing of 0.34 percent of the vote. In the violent Sunni province of Anbar, 113 people voted for him."
But second, I wonder if, in the end, the iraq election will stand? US pundits seem shocked - shocked!- that Iraq has elected a Shiite fundamentalist government with ties to Iran. And I was shocked that they knew so little about Iraq that they would be surprised at this -- who did they THINK the Iraqi electorate would vote for? Anyway, now that Chalabi has hired a PR firm, we'll see whether the "vote fraud" story will be inflated to try to hamper, delay and ultimately invalidate the election result.
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