Beyond Iraq's elections.

• Author: Enders, David

Khalid Kareem, a truck driver from Hit, a city western Al-Anbar province, voted in Iraq's parliamentary elections in December, but he did not do so because he applauds the Americans.

"We want people who will set a timetable for the Americans to leave," says Kareem, who voted in Jordan for Saleh Mutlaq, a secular Sunni candidate. "We want the U.N. and the Arab League to go into the western part of the country to see what is happening."

Despite President Bush's trumpeting of the elections as a symbol of support for the U.S. efforts, many Iraqi voters, like Kareem, cast their ballots to boot out the Americans. Even in Fallujah, a city that is one of the most potent symbols of resistance to the occupation and the new government, local leaders and resistance groups risked assassination by jihadis by encouraging their followers to vote and avoid attacking polling stations. In some cases, these leaders even called upon their people to protect polling stations from Al Qaeda operatives, who threatened death for anyone participating in the political process.

"There is terror and there is resistance," Kareem says.

Other Sunnis joined Kareem at the polls in Jordan. Some said they had come to escape the chaos of western Iraq, which has been paralyzed by two years of fighting between guerrillas, the U.S. military, and to a lesser extent, Shiite and Kurdish units of the Iraqi army.

Moayed Jassim Abed is a truck driver from Ramadi. He boycotted the last election because he felt it was unfair to open polls in the dangerous Sunni areas, he says. But on December 15 he voted for Mutlaq, whose National Trend party competed for the Sunni vote with that of Adnan Dulaimi, a religious Sunni candidate and a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars. Dulaimi, along with the association, has long maintained that nothing short of a promise of a pullout of U.S. troops will lead to negotiations to end the insurgency.

"We want security and stability," Abed says. "The Americans have been there three years and they have done worse than Saddam has done."

Majid Abdul Rahman, also from Ramadi, says he voted for Dulaimi. His disgust with the Americans is palpable. "Sometimes we wait for seven hours at the checkpoint to get into Ramadi," he says. "They have closed the two main bridges into the city, and sometimes we spend the night waiting to get into the city. They have cut the city into two parts and if I want to go shopping, I have to cross from one part of the city to the...