Baghdad
Iraq will not be ready to hold elections by June 30, the target date for the U.S. to hand over power to Iraqis, the U.N. said this week. A report by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said that if Iraq developed a sufficient legal and political system, it could hold elections by the end of this year or early in 2005. But the U.N. did not present a plan or schedule to achieve that goal, leaving it to the Iraqis to work out the details of their transition to democracy. “The more specific they are, the more helpful it would be,” said Samir Shakir Mahmoud, a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. “But at the end of the day, it’s our problem to solve.”
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