Iraqis are looking for some of that good old fashioned U.S. style Democracy...or is that, still looking?

In Blow to U.S. Plans, Top Shiite Demands Direct Elections

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 11 ? In a blow to White House plans for a smooth handover of power to an Iraqi transitional government by July 1, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq said today that members of an interim assembly had to be chosen through direct elections.

The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had called in November for direct elections to counter an American proposal to hold caucus-style elections, but had said he would reconsider his decision if a United Nations committee decided that general elections were not possible.

But in a statement issued today, Ayatollah Sistani essentially left no room for compromise by saying that elections could be held "within the next months with an acceptable level of transparency and credibility."

He added that an interim constitution being drafted by the Iraqi Governing Council would have to be approved by a directly elected assembly for it to have legitimacy.

In another sign that Iraqis were asserting their power, the Governing Council issued new guidelines today for the removal of former Baath Party members from government jobs. Like the Coalition Provisional Authority's previous guidelines, the new ones call for the automatic dismissal of anyone who belonged to the top four levels of the Baath Party. But it allows for people from the fourth level to appeal the dismissal, and says those who choose not to appeal can take a pension.

Disturbing signs emerged of a tenuous security situation in parts of southern Iraq, generally considered much calmer than the north. An Iraqi-American man working for the provisional authority and an Iraqi man were found shot to death execution-style by a highway south of Basra, said Capt. Saddam Mortaza of the Basra police. Their killer or killers had blindfolded the two men and tied their hands behind their backs, then shot them in their heads, Captain Mortaza said.

In the southern town of Amara, protesters armed with sticks and homemade bombs attacked British soldiers outside city hall one day after six people were killed by Iraqi police officers and possibly British soldiers in a demonstration against the country's lack of jobs. More from the NYT

After the ouster of Hussein, the order of things that needed to be done was:

1) Secure Iraq's massive stockpiles of WMD

2) Insure that chaos and/or civil war didn't break out

3) Restore services to the Iraqis -- water, electricity, etc.

4) Start rebuilding the country

5) Work with various groups to get Iraq on the road to democratic rule

I believe that to be correct. Let's see what we have actually done.

1. WMD's turned out to be a myth.

2. Iraq is still in a state of lawlessness outside of the U.S. controlled "Green Zone" in Baghdad.

3. The state of the essential components of the iraqi infrastructure are intermittantly functioning in most areas according to reported, but sabotage remains a problem. The full picture is very cloudy. See link below.

4. Work in this area has begun. This article details the issues. We're far from giving Iraqi firms parity in bidding.

5. Any democracy appears to be conditional. On our terms. The NYT article at the top of this entry provides color.

See this article for further color on the Iraqi economic situation.

Arguably, the most successful single operation in post-war(?) Iraq has been the securing of the oil ministry. I think that this as much as anything is where the Iraqis perceive our priorities to start.

I am not an expert on the region. I'm not even going to play one on the internet. An observation that many have made since Sept. 11 is that all of a sudden the U.S. was filled with WASPy experts on the Middle-East. I was born a skeptic. It has served me well. Many of these self-styled Middle-East experts were simply not.

I am a silicon engineer that has a blog. Nothing more. We'll leave it up to the reader to determine who the experts are.