Insurgency worsening in Iraq: Powell by ABC News / AFP 1:29pm 27th Sep, 2004   September 27, 2004.    United States Secretary of State Colin Powell has warned that organising Iraqi elections in January could prove difficult because of spiralling violence in the country, where he acknowledged the insurgency was "getting worse".    The top US military commander in the region, General John Abizaid, also warned that "we will fight our way through elections" in Iraq, and that he cannot predict that the entire country would be able to vote. "Yes, it's getting worse," Mr Powell told the US ABC television network. "And the reason it's getting worse is that they are determined to disrupt the election. They do not want the Iraqi people to vote for their own leaders in a free, democratic election.. Right now our goal is, and I think it's an achievable goal, is to have full, free and fair elections across the whole country."    Their remarks stood in sharp contrast to the optimistic scenario painted by US President George W Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who vowed last week that elections would go ahead and insisted that "we are succeeding in Iraq".    Mr Powell told CNN television program Late Edition that: "There will be polling stations that are shot at. There will be insurgents who will still be out there who will try to keep people from voting".    "I think what we have to keep shooting for, and what is achievable, is to give everybody the opportunity to vote in the upcoming election, to make the election fully credible, and something that will stand the test of the international community's examination".    His remarks came after Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a congressional committee on Thursday "so be it," if unrest prevents elections from being held in parts of Iraq. "You have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.    Mr Powell said on Sunday that "it has to be seen as a comprehensive, full, free and fair election in order to get the kind of credibility that we want it to have".    Gen Abizaid said he believed that "elections will occur in the vast majority of the country".    "I can't predict 100 per cent that all areas will be available for free fair and peaceful elections," he said on NBC television program Meet the Press. "I assume that there will be certain areas of the country that will have to be fought over in order to have the elections take place."    In an editorial, The New York Times said the mounting insurgency left Washington and Mr Allawi in a Catch 22. "The only hope of quelling the insurgency depends on progress toward democratic government and the only hope of meaningful elections depends on greater progress in quelling the insurgency," it said. "With the original rationales for the Iraq war now discredited and with a spreading insurgency killing scores of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqi civilians every month, the prospect of holding democratically legitimate elections in January is about the only thing the Bush administration could hope for as a sign of eventual success," the newspaper said.    Mr Powell said that an international conference on Iraq could take place in late October or early November in a city in the region, possibly Amman or Cairo, to build support for the country.    Participants could include Iraq's neighbours as well as several industrialised nations, he said. "It will be a conference in the region ... so that all of Iraq's neighbours can sit with Prime Minister Allawi and his Cabinet and discuss why it is in the interest of the whole neighbourhood for there to be a stable Iraq with an elected government, resting on the basis of a democratic system that is no threat to any of its neighbours," Mr Powell said.    Aside from the conference, Mr Powell said talks were under way on securing the Iraqi-Syrian border, bringing together the United States and the two neighbours. "That is happening, and we're calling them tripartite talks on the border. It's a very porous border. It's not an easy border to control.. But with additional technical equipment put in place and with cooperation between the sides, we can do a better job," he said.    --AFP
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