According to this report there is still no local government formed in the Kurdish provinces in northern Iraq. The election for a local parliament and government were held together with the central election at the end of January.
Four month later, the autocratic leaders of the two main Kurdish parties are still fighting about the choice for and role of a regional president. The elected members of the regional parliament have yet to meet.
Meanwhile the U.S. occupation forces are arresting important party leaders without warrants and even without informing their puppet governments and breaking the laws they themselves imposed on the Iraqi people. Oops… Riverbend comments.
The turnout of the January election showed some enthusiasm for ‘democracy’. But by now, that enthusiasm must have changed to sarcasm. The government that took month to form can not deliver any basic service. There is no security from car bombs, planted by who-knows, and no security from arbitrary arrest and mishandling through U.S. troops. The electricity situation is worse than at the begin of the occupation. Water, when available, is not clean and a cholera epidemic is developing. There are no jobs other than in the highly dangerous security business.
Dahr Jamail reports, that "Things are getting worse by the day."
Zarqawi, the current Goldstein of the Iraq war, is either in Syria, in Iran, in Iraq, in Eurasia or Oceania, wounded or well. It does not matter as long as the last rumor is taking up space in the newspapers and airtime that could otherwise be used to report what is really happening in Iraq.
I am hopelessly frustrated by just reading the news. If I would be an Iraqi – no matter if I were Shia or Sunni or secular – no matter of being Arab or Kurd, jobless, my children hungry and ill with cholera, my parents suffering from the heat. What would I do? What would You do?