Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets

But if the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner.

No one was claiming that the insurgency was over or that the deadly attacks would end. But the atmosphere in this usually grim capital, a city at war and an ethnic microcosm of the country, had changed, with people dressed in their finest clothes to go to the polls in what was generally a convivial mood.

"You can feel the enthusiasm," Col. Mike Murray of the First Cavalry Regiment, said outside a polling station in Karada, who added that the scene in Karada was essentially true for the whole area.

In Khadamiya, a mixed area in northwest Baghdad, the turnout was also large, with some representatives of political parties saying the turnout could approach 80 percent.

Even in the so-called Sunni Triangle, a hotbed of resistance to the American occupation, people voted, too. In Baquba, 60 miles north of Baghdad, all the polling stations that reported indicated a huge turnout.

In Mosul, the restive city to the north, large turnouts were reported, even in the Sunni Muslim areas.

---------------------------------

There are other people, aside from the millions of brave Iraqi voters, who are also defiant in their beliefs about...what exactly do these people believe in anyway?

"It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote....I believe the world is less safe today than it was two and a half years ago." - Senator John Kerry - Meet The Press, Janaury 30.

(Later in the interview, Tim Russert asks Kerry whether the United States safer with the newly elected Iraqi government than we would have been with Saddam Hussein. Kerry's answer is "sure".)

Thank God this man did not become President - he has zero credibility.

Here's another laughable exchange.

MR. RUSSERT: Specifically, do you agree with Senator Kennedy that 12,000 American troops should leave at once?

SEN. KERRY: No.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe there should be a specific timetable of withdrawal of American troops?

SEN. KERRY: No.

MR. RUSSERT: What would you do?

SEN. KERRY: I understand exactly what Senator Kennedy is saying, and I agree with Senator Kennedy's perceptions of the problem and of how you deal with it.