"In the end, the problem in Iraq is not this "election" but a profoundly flawed U.S. policy that relies exclusively on the use of force. Despite its awesome power and the spending of billions of dollars to win over impoverished Iraqis, the United States has won little popular support in the country.

"Even if it were possible under the Bush administration, a change in the American approach would accomplish little, so completely discredited is the superpower within Iraq (and in the Middle East and the Islamic world).

"The only hope for peace in Iraq now is the United States agreeing to exit Iraq in exchange for an international force and mission under UN auspices, which would from the very outset indicate to Iraqis that its sole purpose was to help them become genuinely democratic.

"Even then, peace after the bloodbaths will take years to achieve. Which is why a beginning must be made now for the United States to extricate itself from Iraq."

-- from "This Election is a Sham" - by Salim Lone in the International Herald Tribune, Jan. 27, 2005. Lone was an adviser to Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy to post-invasion Iraq who was killed in 2003 in a bomb attack on the UN compound in Baghdad