More bombings as elections race tightens

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's lead over former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi narrowed Tuesday, as reported by Reuters today at the New York Times online, and twin bomb attacks killed eight people in Mussayab, 40 miles south of Baghdad. Seven people were killed by a car bomb in western Anbar province yesterday.

According to Reuters, the blasts raise doubts about how Iraq's fragile security will stand up during what will likely be long and divisive talks among leading politicians to form a government:

One of the main drivers for the bloody insurgency since 2003 has been political marginalisation of a long-dominant Sunni minority. If Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who has galvanized Sunnis' desire to reclaim influence, is shut out of power, it could spell trouble just as Washington halves its troop force and looks towards an end-2011 deadline for withdrawing.

For the current events in Iraq to be the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy of doom on Babylon, the feared violence would need to take the form of burning cities, followed by a withdrawal of all occupying forces in an admission that reconstruction has failed. If, on the other hand, the elections result in a stable government, the cities do not burn, and the U.S. troops withdraw according to the agreed to timetable in a show of success at reconstruction, we can know with certainty that the current Iraq is not the Babylon of Jeremiah's prophecy, and that none of the remaining judgments of civil war, plundering, flood and drought are coming.