They are getting to vote, but they have no control over their own lives, their resources, or their nation. That is classic textbook "sham elections".

The Anglo alliance is orchestrating this bloody charade. Many Iraqis do not know the names of the candidates, let alone their policies.
They have no control over their own oil, no authority over the streets of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, no workable army or loyal police force. Their only power is that of the American military and its 150 000 soldiers whom we could all see on the main intersections of Baghdad.

The big television networks were given a list of five polling stations where they were "allowed" to film. Close inspection of the list shows that four of the five are in Shi'ite Muslim areas - where the polling was expected to be high - and one in an upmarket Sunni area, where it was expected to be moderate. Every working-class Sunni polling station was declared out of bounds to the international press. I wonder if the lads at CNN and MSNBC will tell us that today when they show voters "flocking" to the polls?

No, probably not.

The "Iraqi" government paid unemployed young males to brandish Iraqi flags by the truckload, as they drive around Baghdad putting up the US paid for election posters, to "advertise" the election.

According to the story filed by Robert Fisk:

"The "real" story is outside Baghdad, in the tens of thousands of square kilometres outside the government's control and beyond the sight of independent journalists, especially in the four Sunni Muslim provinces which are at the heart of Iraq's insurrection.

Right up to the election hour, US jets were continuing to bomb "terrorist targets", the latest in the city of Ramadi, which - although US President George Bush and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair do not say so - is now in the hands of the insurgents as surely as Fallujah was before the Americans destroyed it."