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01/21/2006:

"Shia majority cut in Iraqi poll as negotiations begin for new PM"

Sunni Arab parties have tripled their seats in Iraq's parliament, according to final results of last month's election announced yesterday, but the country's next prime minister is almost certain to be a Shia Islamist, with Adel Abdel Mahdi, a former finance minister well-regarded in Washington, as the favoured candidate.
Shia leaders have promised to form a broad-based government and haggling for portfolios has already started.

The United Iraqi Alliance of Shia parties took 128 seats in this 275-member parliament, compared with 146 in the last one. With the Kurdish block dropping from 75 seats to 53, the two groups no longer have the two-thirds majority which allowed them to control last year's constitution-drafting process and push through clauses allowing Iraq's regions to have autonomy.

With Iraq's oil concentrated in predominantly Kurdish and Shia areas, the country's fragmentation risks depriving Baghdad and the largely Sunni western areas of income. Under pressure from the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, last autumn, Kurdish and Shia leaders agreed to let the new parliament review the constitution - a promise which was used to persuade Sunnis not to boycott the elections.

The Sunni alliance, the Consensus Front, won 44 seats. Its main component, the Iraqi Islamic party, is similar to the Muslim Brotherhood in other Arab countries. A secular Sunni list, headed by Saleh al-Mutlaq, which has links with the insurgency, won 11 seats. In the last parliament Sunnis only had 17 seats.

The poll results were delayed for several weeks after some parties complained of fraud and mounted street protests. They were incensed at preliminary figures that gave the Shia list 58% of the vote in Baghdad, although Shia are thought to number only 40% of the capital's population. The protests fizzled out after international monitors were asked to review the election commission's work.
guardian.co.uk

It would be stupid to trust the results of any election in which the U.S. had a hand.