Now this is reporting

The Christian Science Monitor has been following the Methboubs of Baghdad since before the war. Now, among other things, they report on the family's feelings about voting.

Sitting in her dark, cramped apartment during another seemingly interminable power failure, Karima Selman Methboub promises to cast aside her family's fears of violence and doubts about the new Iraq to vote in landmark elections on Sunday.

"We are under the mercy of Allah - I will take all my family with me," says the matriarch, nodding at some of her eight children. "If something will happen, we will all die together."

"We will go directly, suddenly, do our job there, and come back," says Mrs. Methboub, making clear that no car bombs will stop her from a process that, she says, could hardly make things worse.

With a morose fatalism borne of resignation and weariness, families like the Methboubs all over Iraq will go to the polls on Sunday, January 30th (just five days from now!), determined to change their future, knowing that their walk to the polls could be their last living act, convinced that there is nothing else they can do. May God be with them, and may the work the coalition forces are doing make their trip to the polls the first day of the rest of their lives — living in a democracy of their choosing.