... but as I was looking up the total Iraqi population on the
CIA Factbook, I noted a curious "fact" listed at the end of the "background" section.
"The Coalition Provisional Authority transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim Government (IG) in June 2004 and the election of its president, Ghazi al-Ujayl al-YAWR, was held in January 2005."
As we know, the elections were quite successful for the Iranian-backed Shia parties, but I'm pretty sure I read that the existing interim governement didn't do so well in the election.
Wow. I'm right, the CIA's wrong. When does that ever happen?
In fact, al-Yawr wasn't elected president at all. In fact, there's no directe election of president for Iraq. It was a vote for a national legislature.
I'm sure it was an innocent mistake. Like the yellowcake reference, or the mushroom cloud rhetoric, or the mobile bioweapons labs that proved our point about those dangerous, yet exteremly hard-to-find WMDs.
If I wasn't so entirely sick of the entire sordid affair, I'd think it was kinda funny, or ironic, maybe.