The January 30 elections in Iraq will be an important plot point in the debate over U.S. involvement there. Facts and factoids will be sucked into the spinfest: “The elections worked; let’s withdraw our troops.” “The elections didn’t work; let’s withdraw.” “The elections didn’t work and we must stay until they do.” Etc.

The net allows us to step outside the spin room and look behind some of the talking points using a variety of journalistic and Iraqi perspectives. The best place to start is at IWPR.net, the web site of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Read the “Election Backgrounder” to learn why January 30 is more Iowa Caucus than Election Day, then dip into the “Iraqi Press Monitor” for a digest of current news and opinion according to Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, and varieties thereof.

Turning to the blogosphere, Baghdad Burning is in the PDF Top 25 and rising. University of Michigan professor Juan Cole writes the blog of record, Informed Comment. It’s a sign of Cole’s authority that pundits and reporters refer to his “Informed Comment” as points of departure for their own comments and information, even when they’re disagreeing with him. Free-lancer Christopher Allbritton’s Back-to-Iraq corrected an important statistic which got bloated (by Cole, for one) in translation: the chief of Iraqi Intelligence Services’ estimate of how many fighters there are in the insurgency.

For those who want to get involved in the election, at least one of the 83 campaign blocs fielding a slate of candidates is asking English-speakers for money on an overt campaign web site. As of December 31, it had collected a little more than $14,000 online, according to its disclosure page. Two of its twelve candidates run a blog, Iraqthemodel.com, which has won some attention in the United States. The bloggers, a pair of Baghdad brothers, were flown to the U.S. in December and visited President Bush in the Oval Office. A New York Times story yesterday gave prominence to the accusation that the candidate/bloggers might be U.S. agents, but the charge lacks evidence.

Jim Hake, an L.A. businessman with a high-tech background and connections to the U.S. Marines, has set up a web site to grease the flow of “soft power” from non-governmental sources (like you) to Iraq. Spiritofamerica.net has purchased and delivered Frisbees, industrial sewing machines, drinking water, dental kits, and other appurtenances of the good life. Currently, it is soliciting funds for an Iraq Democracy Project that will supply communications equipment, technical assistance, and micro-grants to in-country community organizations, student groups and bloggers.

[Editor’s note: Online political activists of all stripes might want to take a look at the back-end tools created for members of SpiritofAmerica to manage their own relationship to the project: a nifty “member dashboard” allows people to select their specific areas of interest, track their donations to specific projects, create an activist team, schedule events, or find out about local events created by others in the network. If that sounds a little like the tool set built by Howard Dean’s Internet squadron, it’s not a coincidence, as one of the key developers of SpiritofAmerica’s back-end is Britt Blaser, who spent a week a month in Burlington in 2003, helping the Dean campaign with its Internet activism. He discusses the thinking behind the design of the SpiritofAmerica site on his blog, here.]

Hake aspires to facilitate online election night coverage from Iraq on January 30. On the spiritofamerica.net wish list:
- $1,000 funds a "Best Election Blog" prize in one of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
- $550 buys a satellite telephone for an election correspondent.
- $325 buys a Mini-DV camcorder for an election correspondent.
Donors to spiritofamerica.net disagree on U.S. involvement in the war, but not about the necessity of politics and civil society triumphing over terrorism.

I did not find the equivalent of a voter’s guide in my searches: a matrix displaying the leading parties and their platforms. But that, and much else, may be forthcoming as the big day approaches.

Michael Cornfield, a political scientist, studies campaign politics, the public discourse, and the internet. He is the author of two books on the subject: Politics Moves Online: Campaigning and the Internet (The Century Foundation, 2004) and The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values, co-edited with David M. Anderson (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

Cornfield currently serves as a Senior Research Consultant to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and a senior adviser to RightClick Strategies, a political consulting firm to associations, interest groups, and member-based organizations.