The Warzone Election

The election in Iraq is coming ever closer, and insurgents are stepping up attacks in anticipation of that event, hoping to cause enough disruption to either cancel it, or render it ineffective somehow. This is not the first warzone election ever held, however, and a parallel lies only two decades in the past. Courtesy of the Iraq Election Diatribes:

Conditions were horrible when Salvadorans went to the polls on March 28, 1982. The country was in the midst of a civil war that would take 75,000 lives. An insurgent army controlled about a third of the nation's territory. Just before election day, the insurgents stepped up their terror campaign. They attacked the National Palace, staged highway assaults that cut the nation in two and blew up schools that were to be polling places.

Yet voters came out in the hundreds of thousands. In some towns, they had to duck beneath sniper fire to get to the polls. In San Salvador, a bomb went off near a line of people waiting outside a polling station. The people scattered, then the line reformed. "This nation may be falling apart," one voter told The Christian Science Monitor, "but by voting we may help to hold it together."

This is an excerpt from a longer NYT piece, which manages to hold some wisdom for us, a surprise considering the source. I have no doubt that there will be serious problems with the elections in Iraq. Many will die. But they will happen, and Iraq will move forward, no matter how hard the terrorists try to halt this progress.