Insurgents made good on their repeated threats to attack Iraq's polling stations on election day, unleashing car and suicide bombs, mortars, rockets, small-arms fire and grenades in 109 separate attacks, according to U.S. officials.
In all, there were more attacks than on any other day in Iraq since the U.S. invasion almost two years ago. Across the country, insurgents launched 260 attacks against targets of all kinds, including U.S. military and Iraqi security forces, officials said. Yet the casualty count —45 dead, about 100 wounded — did not rank among the highest one-day totals.
The insurgents' unprecedented effort to sow fear was overshadowed by the determination of multitudes of ordinary Iraqis to vote regardless of the danger and by the effectiveness of the joint Iraqi-U.S. security operation that allowed them to do so.
"The insurgents tried to disrupt this election with the highest level of attacks we have ever seen. They did not succeed," a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad who briefed reporters Monday said on the condition he not be identified further. "To be blunt, there were very low casualties for the number of attacks.
"This was a terrific security effort, particularly by the Iraqi forces."
The day was not, however, an unqualified success for multinational and Iraqi forces. A British military C-130 cargo plane crashed Sunday afternoon, and on Monday an insurgent group claimed to have shot it down with a missile. Also, two U.S. Marines were killed in separate incidents Sunday.
A model for security?
Still, the striking success of election security was the talk of Baghdad on Monday.
The city of 5 million was locked down tight on election day. Car bombers had no chance on streets emptied of every vehicle except the blue-and-white trucks of the Iraqi police and the U.S. patrols that were stationed at every major intersection. Side streets teemed with people walking to polling stations. Children played raucous soccer games on every thoroughfare.
Baghdad residents said their city on Sunday reminded them of the days immediately after the fall of president Saddam Hussein, only far safer. With Americans almost omnipresent and intently focused on people's behavior, no one dared carry away large sections of the capital's infrastructure as thousands of looters did, unchallenged, for weeks following the invasion.
As U.S. officials toured the city Sunday, several privately asked colleagues how different the last two years in Iraq might have been if the invasion force had been able to secure Baghdad after taking it.
"Yeah," said one U.S. official, "maybe they wouldn't have looted the whole [expletive] place, not to put too fine a point on it."
"I'm always attracted to the statement of [Winston] Churchill's that you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing — after they try everything else," the official said.
Iraqi forces draw praise
The emphasis this time, however, was on the Iraqi forces. About 100,000 recently trained Iraqi soldiers and police officers were on duty over the weekend, supplementing the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. And while the Americans held the streets and stood primed to help, it was Iraqi forces who stood guard at the nation's 5,000 polling sites.
American and Iraqi officials agreed, however, that the performance of Iraqi forces does not mean they are ready to take over for U.S. troops in battling a complex insurgency. At a Baghdad news conference, interim Interior Minister Falah Naqib said that his ministry's forces, some of whom U.S. commanders have previously singled out for praise, are still 18 months from being "qualified."
But Naqib called the day a watershed for forces whose performance on less static battlefields has been checkered at best. "The Iraqi people have regained their trust in the Iraqi security forces," Naqib declared.
U.S. officials also were lavish in their praise, with one saying the Iraqis performed "magnificently." Carlos Valenzuela, the chief U.N. election adviser in Iraq, also admitted to some relief.
"Everybody agreed that the forefront had to be Iraqis," he said. "But there was a lot of questioning and a lot of worries."
Months of planning
Officials said the one-day operation was months in the making. On the military side, commanders dated their campaign for a safe election day to November, when U.S. forces mounted an offensive to retake the western city of Fallujah from insurgents. That high-profile operation was followed by hundreds of raids and roundups intended to keep insurgents off balance and deprive them the havens that enabled them to organize and plan.
At the same time, commanders and officials laid out a plan for election weekend. To put every possible uniform on the street, the interim government cancelled all leaves for police officers and soldiers and offered the police extra pay to stick around. U.S. forces stockpiled supplies at the dozens of American bases around the country, to deny insurgents convoys easy targets on election day.
Aircraft were deployed en masse. The skies over the capital buzzed with U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and F-18A fighter jets — in large part because captured insurgents have said they are especially intimidated by aircraft, one official said.
As a final touch, Iraq's new army rolled out its armor. On election day, Soviet-era T-55 tanks and armored personnel carriers were stationed on squares in Baghdad. Apparently the only bits of Iraqi armor not destroyed in the invasion, a U.S. official said, were reclaimed from the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition militia that Hussein had armed and used as a surrogate force inside Iraq.
"The security plan is perfect," interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi announced after casting his vote.
Haphazard attacks
The day bore him out. Insurgent attacks, which U.S. commanders say had grown more ragged in recent weeks, showed no great improvement on the big day. Though assaults were so numerous that at mid-morning Baghdad sounded like a war zone — consecutive explosions echoing across the city for most of an hour — the insurgents were flailing. Naqib said at one point they sent a handicapped child to a polling station wearing a suicide vest; he offered no details.
"In essence they threw inexperienced, unprepared, discombobulated people out there to do something, to make a big splash," the U.S. diplomat said. "And they didn't do anything anywhere."
Several officials cautioned that after so conspicuous a failure, insurgent leaders are almost certain to mount a flurry of attacks on streets that, at noon Monday, were again open to traffic.
The Baath Party loyalists believed to form the backbone of the insurgency will likely remain committed to returning to power "by the end of a gun," as one U.S. official said.
Another noted that extremists such as Abu Musab Zarqawi "and Zarqawi wannabes, they're all about violence, and they're all about chaos."
Still, in the long term, those working to establish stability in Iraq counted Sunday as a big win.
"They tried to stop us doing Fallujah," the diplomat said. "They failed. They tried to stop planning for the elections. They failed. They then set out to stop the election. They failed.
"Sooner or later, these failures add up."