Opinion: Iraq Elections No Silver Bullet. The Bush administration has hyped the Iraqi elections scheduled for late January 2005 as a turning point in the struggle to win the war it launched nearly two years ago. True, any government that emerges from a reasonably fair election must enjoy more legitimacy than the narrowly based group of occupation supporters to whom Washington turned over the trappings of sovereignty on June 28. But the election will almost certainly not secure a pro-American government in Baghdad. (Jeffrey Laurenti, a Century Foundation scholar on the United Nations, via US Newswire)