Insurgents Attacked, but Voters Persevered

Iraqi soldiers celebrate in Najaf a day after the vote. U.S. officials praised Iraqi forces for their role in securing polling sites. (Alaa Marjani -- AP)

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."

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 of 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 canceled 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 the easy targets of convoys 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.

The day bore him out. Insurgent attacks, which U.S. commanders said 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 that at one point a handicapped child was sent 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 were 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."