The votes have been tabulated

Juan Cole has the results of the Iraqi election tabulation here.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post points out that an electoral victory of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, both of them close to Tehran, is not what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Neoconservatives had been going for with this Iraq adventure. The United Iraqi Alliance is led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric who lived over 2 decades in exile in Iran. I point out that the likely coalition partner of the United Iraqi Alliance is the Kurdistan Alliance, led by Jalal Talabani, who is himself very close to Tehran. So there are likely to be warm Baghdad-Tehran relations.

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Likewise, it is worth pointing out that the new Shiite government in Baghdad will support the Lebanese Shiites, including Hezbollah.

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Allawi is irrelevant, since it is easier and more of a sure thing for the UIA to ally with the Kurds, who bring another 24 percent (more, now) into the coalition. They do not need to throw Allawi a bone to get the Kurds, they need to throw the Kurds some bones.

  Juan Cole post

The three big winners were the United Iraqi Alliance (over 48 percent), the Kurdistan alliance (26 percent) and the Iraqiyah list of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi (a little over 13 percent).

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Although Allawi's list is among the three with more than two digits, in fact he lost big. Allawi had all the advantages of incumbency. He dominated the air waves in December and January. He went to Baghdad University and made all sorts of promises to the students there and it was dutifully broadcast, and there were lots of photo ops like that. Allawi's list also spent an enormouos amount on campaign advertising. The source of these millions is unknown, since Paul Bremer passed a law making disclosure of campaign contributions unnecessary (the Bush administration's further little contribution to "democracy" in the Middle East). Despite these enormous advantages, clear American backing, money, etc., Allawi's list came in a poor third and clearly lacks any substantial grass roots in most of the country.

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Allawi's defeat (he will not be prime minister in the new government) is a huge defeat for the Bush administration, though it will not be reported that way in the corporate media.
  Juan Cole article at Information Clearinghouse

As for getting those Iraqi soldiers trained up and ready...

The small number of soldiers, national guardsmen and police capable of operating against the country's bloody insurgency is concealed in an overall total of Iraqis in uniform, which includes raw recruits and police who have gone on duty after as little as three weeks' training. In some cases they have no weapons, body armour or even documents to show they are in the police.

The resulting confusion over numbers has allowed the US administration to claim that it is half-way to meeting the target of training almost 270,000 Iraqi forces, including around 52,000 troops and 135,000 Iraqi policemen. The reality, according to experts, is that there may be as few as 5,000 troops who could be considered combat ready.
  UK Independent article

We Americans are never ones to let the truth get in the way...or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, we are so respectful of the truth because we haven't had much opportunity to get aquainted with it....

Americans are a bit more optimistic about Iraq's future, a bright spot for the administration in an Associated Press poll that indicates many are souring on President Bush's job performance.

Half in the AP-Ipsos poll, 51 percent, said they think a stable, democratic Iraq is likely, up from the 46 percent who felt that way before Iraq elections in January.
  Tucson Citizen article

An indication that, while reporting on Butthead's domestic policies, the media are still not getting out the information about what's really happening in Iraq. An interesting situation that will make it easy for whoever finds himself in the oval office in 2008 to continue America's Imperial warring on the world.

Meanwhile...

Gunmen ambushed a car carrying an Iraqi general in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad on Sunday, killing him and two companions, police officials said.
  CBS article

Two political associates of Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi were killed Sunday, al-Arabiya television reported.
  MENAFN article