Eleven months after the Anglo-American forces started the war, the promise of peace and normalisation seems to keep getting blown up in an orgy of violence and continuing instability. Conservative estimates place Iraqi civilian casualties closer to 10,000, with more than 3,000 soldiers dead. The United States itself are suffered casualties at an average of more then one soldier killed and over ten wounded on an average per day over the past ten months. The assessment of the US administrator in Iraq, Ambassador Paul Bremer, that Iraq would continue to face serious security threats for quite some time in the future is accurate. Since the domestic instruments of law and order, as well as military forces, were disbanded rather peremptorily by the US after the fall of Baghdad, external assistance to maintain security became a necessity. The problem is that domestic security forces — now being re-created — have come to be perceived as instruments of the occupation forces. Because they are still inexperienced they are themselves becoming the target of choice by the resistance as the recent coordinated attacks on police stations in Falluja and elsewhere indicates.Meanwhile the intensity of demands for handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis at an early date has been rising. And so have been the demands for the United Nations to oversee the transfer of power to the local people. The UN secretary general is expected to announce his recommendation on the future course of action based on the report of his special representative after his consultations in Iraq. The core political issue now is whether the elections should be directly based on the principle of one-person one-vote, or power to be handed over to a provisional government selected through an indirect process. The nature of transfer of power may well be governed by the complexities involved in the timing of it. What makes things even more complicated is the impending US presidential election. Every delay in resolving the issue of transfer of power would only aggravate domestic violence making stability in this war-torn country even more elusive.
