Fear stalks the wealthy as well as the vulnerable and poor.
"I am a contractor, I have three companies, and I am well known here and I am afraid," said Mushtaq Juboori, an architectural engineer who lives in the wealthy Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad. He has stopped going to his spacious downtown office because he fears being killed in one of the bombings.
Juboori is also afraid that he could become a target because he is building a part of a hospital in Tikrit. Although his contract is with the International Committee of the Red Cross, he thinks insurgents might believe he is being paid by the Americans.
"Freedom or democracy should not be the goal," he said. "Look at what the results have been: we lost our security and our water, our electricity."
His son listened, nodding. "Security is more important than the election," he said. "What is freedom if we can't walk to the end of the road in safety?"
The members of the Juboori family are hardly alone in their sense that their lives are constrained by the violence. The politicians on every one of the major lists competing in today's election have heard the concerns and are running either overtly or more quietly on the promise to work to improve security.
Implicit, however, is that the freedoms and human rights associated with democracy will have to wait.
In many respects, such compromises already have been made. One of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's first acts was to ensure that he had the power to enact a state of emergency, including the right to impose curfews, cordon off cities and call in troops. Human rights organizations accuse the Interior Ministry of stepping over the line in its treatment of suspected insurgents and torturing them to extract confessions.
Allawi has run almost entirely on a security platform, promising to get still tougher with the insurgents.
The United Iraqi Alliance, the political slate most likely to win the largest share of votes, avoids the "get tough" language of Allawi, but a major plank of its platform is an overhaul of the security services. Its leading candidates believe Allawi and his top appointees have let in too many former Baath Party members, and they want to see them purged.
The goal is to improve security, said Hussein Shahristani, one of the leading alliance members. "Our two main concerns about the current police, national guard and other armed forces is that there is high-level corruption and that some of them are collaborators with the terrorists," Shahristani said.
"If we have much to say in the next government, we'll insist on cleaning up the security services, the police and the national guard from all these elements," he said.
The leading Kurdish list is also heavily focused on security. Known for having a highly efficient armed militia, the peshmerga, and considerable experience with terrorists, the Kurds have operatives at top levels in many of the security ministries.
For the foreseeable future, the country's authorities will be focused on security. The language of democracy, such as respecting human rights and the rule of law, may have to wait its turn.
