On Dec. 15, Iraq held its first parliamentary elections in some half a century. Within two-and-a-half months of them, it was collapsing into civil war: The two events were closely related and the second appears to have been in large part a consequence of the first.
The Sunni Muslim insurgents in central Iraq have been trying in vain for at least two-and-a-half years to provoke a full-scale civil war in Iraq and, until the December elections, they had continued to fail miserably. |