LOL

This is what one senior SIIC official had to say about the election results to a group of Iraqis when he recently visited Iran.

"Does Maliki really have a strong mandate in Iraq? How many votes did he actually manage to get? One million? More? Well in the general election Allawi managed to get a very similar number of votes. Most Shia parties were against Allawi, the marja'iya was against him too, and yet he still managed to get over a million votes. There is nothing special about Maliki this time.

"It was a conspiracy against SIIC. The election results were fixed by people who wanted to make sure SIIC failed. In many areas in Baghdad where we had a strong footing the people were forced to vote in a different area to where they were living. This of course means not everyone could go out and vote. We lost many votes like this.

"Even after the votes were cast, our observers would call us immediately and tell us we did very well, yet when the containers get sent over to the central office for finalization, strangely our numbers decrease dramatically. This happened many times. Something went wrong and we are sure many of our votes were deliberately not counted and ignored"

Although this is comical it is no surprise. I was in my home in London watching the elections with friends on different Iraqi channels. Mainly Iraqiya, Forat, and Sharqiya. Three channels all with a different agenda to push. We sat for hours switching between these channels and they were pretty consistent. Iraqiya was all Maliki, Maliki and more Maliki. Sharqiya was having a heart attack over fraud and vote rigging and Forat was airing good news about how smooth things have run. Then something very strange happened. Forat suddenly put breaking news that there have been security breaches (i.e. rigging) and Sharqiya was now airing opinions that for the most part the elections were transparent. Sharqiya turned into Forat and Forat turned into Sharqiya. We couldn't believe our eyes and ears.

This is the Bush/Kerry 2004 conspiracy...Iraqi style. The million dollar question is who is going to be the Iraqi Obama and put the fake Prime Minister Maliki to the sword. And who says politics is boring?