Beyond Iraq's elections.

Khalid Kareem, a truck driver from Hit, a city western Al-Anbar province, voted in Iraq's parliamentary elections in December, but he did not do so because he applauds the Americans.

"We want people who will set a timetable for the Americans to leave," says Kareem, who voted in Jordan for Saleh Mutlaq, a secular Sunni candidate. "We want the U.N. and the Arab League to go into the western part of the country to see what is happening."

Despite President Bush's trumpeting of the elections as a symbol of support for the U.S. efforts, many Iraqi voters, like Kareem, cast their ballots to boot out the Americans. Even in Fallujah, a city that is one of the most potent symbols of resistance to the occupation and the new government, local leaders and resistance groups risked assassination by jihadis by encouraging their followers to vote and avoid attacking polling stations. In some cases, these leaders even called upon their people to protect polling stations from Al Qaeda operatives, who threatened death for anyone participating in the political process.

"There is terror and there is resistance," Kareem says.

Other Sunnis joined Kareem at the polls in Jordan. Some said they had come to escape the chaos of western Iraq, which has been paralyzed by two years of fighting between guerrillas, the U.S. military, and to a lesser extent, Shiite and Kurdish units of the Iraqi army.

Moayed Jassim Abed is a truck driver from Ramadi. He boycotted the last election because he felt it was unfair to open polls in the dangerous Sunni areas, he says. But on December 15 he voted for Mutlaq, whose National Trend party competed for the Sunni vote with that of Adnan Dulaimi, a religious Sunni candidate and a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars. Dulaimi, along with the association, has long maintained that nothing short of a promise of a pullout of U.S. troops will lead to negotiations to end the insurgency.

"We want security and stability," Abed says. "The Americans have been there three years and they have done worse than Saddam has done."

Majid Abdul Rahman, also from Ramadi, says he voted for Dulaimi. His disgust with the Americans is palpable. "Sometimes we wait for seven hours at the checkpoint to get into Ramadi," he says. "They have closed the two main bridges into the city, and sometimes we spend the night waiting to get into the city. They have cut the city into two parts and if I want to go shopping, I have to cross from one part of the city to the other, and there are snipers. There is no work at all. I have shops there but I am forced to close them and come here."

Jassim Mohamed Ibrahim, who works as a driver ferrying passengers from Baghdad to Amman, sees a pullout as a simple quality-of-life issue. Leaning on the hood of his car while a friend replaced the windshield (it had been shot by American soldiers near Abu Ghraib two days earlier), Ibrahim says he would likely be put out of business by the recent rise in gasoline prices, which many Iraqis blame on the end of rationing and the chaos created by the American presence.

"The price has affected our work so much that all of the money we make is being spent on fuel," he says.

Ibrahim also says the U.S. military regularly kills people traveling between Iraq and Jordan.

"They killed a man I know a few days ago near the border. His name was Bassem Al-Basrawi," he says. "They also killed a woman and her family. They do that all the time."

A recent Oxford Research Associates poll conducted for a umber of Western media organizations found two-thirds of Iraqis oppose the presence of U.S. troops in their country. In the same poll, "occupation forces" came last behind religious leaders, police, the United Nations, the new Iraqi army, and political parties when Iraqis were asked, "How much confidence do you have in ...?" A survey conducted by Iraqi pollster Saadoun Al-Dulaimi (now the minister of defense) ahead of the January 2005 elections found that 85 percent of Iraqis wanted withdrawal "as soon as possible."

At the close of the Cairo Reconciliation Conference in November, Iraqi politicians issued a statement reflecting that sentiment.

"Resistance is the legitimate right of all peoples," it said, but "terrorism does not constitute legitimate resistance." The statement also called for "withdrawal of foreign troops according to a timetable."

Iraqi parliamentarians in June 2005 used language remarkably similar to that employed in the Cairo statement. Requesting a timetable for withdrawal, many lawmakers were angry they had not been allowed to vote on the status of U.S. troops and that the soldiers were able to act with impunity while President Bush and the United Nations referred to the new government as "sovereign." Those calling for the right to determine the status of U.S. troops included Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's deputy Jewad Al-Maliky as well as members of the Sunni, Christian, and Kurdish communities.

Bush's mantra, "we'll stand down as they stand up," does not sit well with many Iraqis. The followers of Moqtada Al-Sadr and Sunni guerrillas, in particular, believe such language gives the United States a pretext to prolong the occupation.

"They would like to stay in Iraq," argues Falah Hassan, the member of parliament who led the June 2005 call for a timetable. He labels the Iraqi troops the United States is training "the forces of the occupiers."

Monather Al-Samarraie is a former ministry of interior official who fled to Jordan after bringing to light evidence that U.S.-trained forces have carried out extrajudicial killings after dark, often targeting Sunnis believed to be lending support to the insurgency.

Al-Samarraie says U.S. forces were aware of the abuse long before they raided the Interior Ministry prison. Because of the 11 p.m. curfew enforced by U.S. troops in Baghdad, after-curfew raids could be conducted only by Iraqi forces with U.S. consent.

"They know about all of them," he says. "The Americans have sovereignty over the night."

The best recruiting tools for the resistance have been U.S.-run detention centers that are operated without any Iraqi oversight.

"I have many friends who were in prison with me who were not part of the resistance before and then joined it after they were released," says an Iraqi colleague of mine who spent eight months in Abu Ghraib.

The new assembly, which will have Sunni representation and greater representation from followers of Moqtada Al-Sadr, will be even more hostile to the U.S. presence than the previous one.

"It will lead to a timetable for the withdrawal of the Americans," says Ghaith Al-Tamimi, a Shiite living in Sadr City and an organizer for the Sadr Movement.

"Our participation in this election is part of the peaceful resistance that Sayyed Moqtada called for," he adds. Iraqis "participated in these elections because they want American forces to leave the country."

David Enders is the author of "Baghdad Bulletin. "He wrote "In the Shadow of Sistani" in the December issue.