Iraqi elections

This is a story from yesterday, but I still think that it is worthy of comment.

BAGHDAD -- Militants surrounded a bus full of unarmed Iraqi contractors as they rode to work Sunday morning, gunned down and killed 17 of them. . .

He said the attack began at 8:30 a.m., when a sedan overtook the bus and cut it off just before it stopped to let the contractors off. Several attackers leapt out of the sedan, another group in a second car drove alongside, and both groups opened fire on the bus with AK-47 rifles until they ran out of ammunition, Coppernoll said. They then got back into their cars and fled.

By any definition, this is terrorism. To what end?

The ambush was part of an intensified insurgent campaign aimed at terrorizing Iraq's fledgling security forces and fomenting sectarian divisions that could undermine the elections or perhaps force a delay.

So what should we do? Sunni political parties say give the terrorists what they want, and postpone the elections.

But the political leaders who gathered in Baghdad on Sunday, mostly Sunni Arabs representing about 40 political parties and individuals, said that the insurgents' campaign of violence and intimidation made credible elections impossible for the moment, and that conducting them in January would achieve an illegitimate result that could provoke further civil conflict.

Provoke further civil conflict? I haven't noticed much restraint from these bastards to this point.

The situation in Iraq is obviously tenuous, and success is far from assured, but postponing the elections because terrorists are murdering civilians with the goal of causing a postponement of the elections sounds like a terrible idea to me.