By Larry Kaplow and Lennox Samuels

We don't have a scientific survey but would hazard to guess that most U.S. soldiers in Iraq are voting for Sen. John McCain. However, the spread between him and Sen. Barack Obama is probably much smaller than it was between George W. Bush and John Kerry four years ago. Meanwhile, military contractors, a motley crew ranging from accountants to bus drivers and usually attached to big defense companies, tend further toward the right than soldiers. And security contractors – former soldiers and cops pulling in lucrative incomes – are more right still. In that spirit, here are a few things we've overheard on U.S. installations in recent days about the upcoming elections:

"If Joe the Plumber wants a job, he should bring his ass to Iraq. There are plenty of plumbing jobs here,"—from a U.S. soldier who won't explicitly state his preference but we're guessing is for Obama. He says his vote is based on the economic problems he hears from his wife back home, not the Iraq war. "This is where the jobs are. We need to be doing this in America," he grouses, gesturing at the large U.S. infrastructure around him.

"My wife is talking about moving . . . to South Africa," said a U.S. logistics contractor lamenting a possible Obama victory that would leave America with an "even worse administration than the one we have now."

And from a Blackwater security guard there was this pithy declaration: "I'm voting against socialism." Well, Obama is on record saying there's too great a difference between the modest salaries of U.S. troops and the high pay for the private gunmen. It sounds like economics, not the Iraq war, might be their deciding factor, too.

By Lennox Samuels

In recent days, attacks against Christians in Mosul have forced thousands of the faithful to flee the northern Iraqi city, in an episode that has been condemned by everyone from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to Coalition authorities to Pope Benedict XVI. But there’s little agreement about exactly what’s going on or what’s been driving the violence. Depending on who you talk to, the killings constitute a wave of terrorism designed to run off members of the religion, a last-gasp campaign by Al Qaeda in Iraq, or overstatement by Iraqi media.

To begin with, the number of fatalities is hard to pin down. Some Christian leaders say at least 20 people have been killed. U.S. and Iraqi officials say that’s inflated. “We have confirmed eight Christian killings since the end of September,” including one where the suspect also was Christian, says Major Gen. Mark Hertling, U.S. military commander in northern Iraq. Christian-community leaders who met recently in Mosul with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Rafi Hiyad al-Issawi, Nineweh governor Duraid Kashmula and other officials to demand redress, put the number at 12. “They were mostly killed after someone asked them for their identification and then learned they were Christian,” Emanuel Khoshaba Youkhana, deputy secretary-general of the Assyrian Patriotic Party, tells NEWSWEEK.

Whatever the real number of Christians who have died in recent attacks, there’s no question that thousands of them have fled Mosul. United Nations estimates indicate at least 12,000 have been displaced. The Assyrian Patriotic Party says 2,351 families have left Mosul for Iraqi cities like Kirkuk, Erbil and Dohuk as well as Lebanon and Syria, where several hundred are living in refugee camps. The displacement follows a ratcheting up of threats against Christians, whose presence in Iraq dates to the 1st century A.D. The Christians, mostly of the Chaldean or Eastern Rite tradition, have for the most part lived quietly among Muslims in the country, with intermittent periods of persecution. Now they are afraid to remain in Mosul, spooked by the killings, threats and rumors of religious cleansing. It is not certain who is behind the current attacks. As Iraq slid into war and insurgency after 2003, some Islamists targeted Christians, branding them infidels and allies of America. Christians received threats from extremist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq even before the latest violence erupted in late September. The group is synonymous with Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has retreated to Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, as U.S. and Iraqi forces drove the network from the rest of the country. Maj. Gen. Hertling says some seized documents show insurgents lauding the attacks as a success “because it was causing confusion among the people of Mosul.” The moves against Christians come as tensions in Mosul are rising again, with the Maliki government trying to reduce the influence of the Kurds and Sunni tribal leaders vowing to fight to keep the city in Arab hands.

Iraqi military brass insist the city is safer than reports suggest and claim that the attacks are less about going after a religious denomination and more about keeping the city off-balance by stirring fear and division among its residents. “Mosul has become totally secure but the truth is not being delivered,” says Lt. Gen. Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq, Iraqi military commander in Nineveh governorate, who likes to admonish the press to write less divisive stories. “In Anbar [province] you had good Sunnis [in the Awakening] fighting against bad Sunnis. Here you have bad Sunnis who are trying to drive a wedge between every group of people.” He says a special committee is investigating the attacks.

The central government in Baghdad is exhorting Christians who fled to return to their homes. At his meeting in Mosul, Deputy Prime Minister Issawi called the attacks “terrorists acts” and pledged to compensate Christians for their losses. Flush with cash, Baghdad is offering about $900 to every family that comes back. At the same meeting, the Christians delivered additional demands, including better security, greater development at the government’s expense and that the 12 slain Christians be treated “just like any other Iraqi martyrs.” Riyadh offers to take anyone on a tour of the city to show how secure it is, but both he and Hertling concede that conditions are unlikely to truly change unless the city’s infrastructure and severe unemployment problems are addressed. Emanuel, the Assyrian politician, says some families have returned but “given the lack of trust, I don’t think most will.” With suspicion so deep, it will take more than money and promises to woo back the city’s Christian minority.

While American politicians debate who's a maverick willing to take on the establishment, Iraq's Mithal al-Alusi meets the criteria and pays the price. In the latest in a series of battles with what he calls the "fascist" religious parties running the government, Alusi was banned from parliament for making his third trip to Israel—or, the "Zionist entity" as it's known in official Iraqi correspondence. He is not allowed to leave Iraq, could face prosecution and says he is hearing of threats on his life.

His trip to an anti-terrorism conference near Tel Aviv was his third public visit to the country that Saddam Hussein fired rockets at during the Gulf War in 1991 and that bombed Iraq's reactor in 1981. His speech at a 2006 conference there is on YouTube. Each time he has faced condemnation from the post-Saddam leaders of the new Iraq. His two grown sons were killed in an attack in 2005. The Israel trip was supposedly used to motivate the killers, though they might have been sent by rival politicians seeking to neutralize their father, who has formed a small but expanding secular party.

The Iraqi parliament acted with uncharacteristic speed and unity last month in condemning Alusi. In stripping him of his parliamentary immunity, they open the door to prosecution on some charge, like treason or aiding an enemy state.

The problem is that in a country that's been at war with so many countries in recent decades, it's hard to discern which countries are still enemies. As Alusi points out, Iraq and Iran fought a long war in the 1980s but travel between those countries is going on by the thousands every month. That war ended with a ceasefire that some Iraqis contended never actually officially ended their hostilities. Of course, Iraq attacked Kuwait in 1990 but Kuwait now has an ambassador in Baghdad. And Turkey regularly pounds Iraqi Kurdish rebels with air strikes and artillery now while Turkish companies compete for government contracts. Alusi, in an appeal to the Iraqi high court, contends that travel to Israel is legal. But Israel is still almost as potent a bogeyman in the new Iraq as it was under Saddam. (The middle-aged Alusi also opposed Saddam, serving jail time for his part in the takeover of the Iraqi embassy in Germany to protest against the dictator.)

Members of the Shiite religious party leading the government appeared to lead the attack on Alusi. He says it is in part retaliation for his frequent criticism of them and because they fear his party will siphon off voters already fed up with fundamentalist politicians. He says Iranian surrogates have approached him with money to silence him. But he insists Iraq, Israel and other Iraqi neighbors should band together to fight terror and their common enemy, Iran.

Updated charts the military provided to NEWSWEEK showed that the number of attacks around the country dropped back to pre-Ramadan levels when the holy month ended at the beginning of October. Attacks – everything from bombings to rifle fire to destruction of oil lines – occurred less than 250 times a week throughout Iraq in the first two weeks of this month. September had seen a blip during Ramadan, but that was just a fraction of the violent spikes during previous Ramadan months (as marked in yellow columns on the chart). It's still a disturbing rate of attacks to live through on the ground and Iraqis grew increasingly stressed when there were several days in a row of prominent bombings or assassinations. But it's nowhere near the all-out mayhem of mid-2007, when there were nearly 1,600 incidents in a week:

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The second chart shows civilian deaths as counted by U.S. and Iraqi officials. This shows that deaths are down to just below levels seen previously in 2006, what was already seen as a dangerous and unstable time:

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What to do about the damage at the Iraq National Museum has never been so clear cut. Ever since it was looted in the anarchy after the United States 2003 invasion, it has been the subject of controversy over how many thousands of pieces were taken and how to get them back as they're sold around the world and general confusion. It continued as a symbol of America's haphazard occupation years later as top-flight Iraqi archeologists fled under threat. While experts from the United States and other countries have made efforts to aid Iraq's struggling antiquities institutions, Iraqi bureaucracy and corruption slowed the work and confounded the outsiders. Some stolen pieces were found and plastered back together but rebuilding an entire archeological establishment is a lot more complicated. The Iraq National Museum still has not been able to open for the public. It lacks air conditioning, regular electricity, security systems and safe surroundings.

But the slow road to recovery advanced a step today when U.S. and Iraqi officials met in the museum's auditorium to announce a $14 million aid program. The relatively modest sum compared to the billions poured into the country monthly for everything from generators to supplying the Iraqi army with weapons is the largest gift received by the museum so far, according to director Amira Edan al-Dahab. Al-Dahab called today the "happiest" day the museum has ever seen. Asked later about the saddest day, she said, "the looting, of course."

The two-year grant, which was announced by First Lady Laura Bush in Washington last week, is for refurbishing the museum complex, sending Iraqi archeologists to train in the United States and opening a conservation center in the northern city of Irbil. Stony Brook University in New York and the University of Chicago are two premier archeological brain trusts involved in the project and, indeed, have been working since the war began to protect Iraq's antiquities.

But the Baghdad ceremony was also another reminder of the remaining problems, as Newsweek wrote about in February. The event was held in the small auditorium, where there was no air conditioning and the room was lit by flood lights tacked to the walls while the main lighting stayed dark. The museum is a campus of buildings where hundreds of workers study artifacts from the country's more than 12,000 historic sites. All but a few of the sites are unprotected and open to continued raiding. To be sure, the war did not bring all the havoc. The sites were also regularly pillaged as Saddam Hussein's control slipped throughout the 1990s and corrupt officials sent some antiquities to the black market. Meanwhile today's government provides too little money to protect the country's vast network of ancient sites. Historical texts are being lost for sure as smugglers zero toss them aside in search of flashier objects.

An Italian archeological institute has led the renovation of two museum galleries. They are closed to the public but NEWSWEEK has toured them in the past. One is a spectacular collection of large statues and wall-sized stone relief tablets, more than 2,000 years old and telling stories or peace treaties and military offensives. Another gallery highlights stone and woodwork from early Islam. The rest of the dozen or so galleries are in disarray. The roof leaks and U.S. military project to repair it has been held up in a bureaucratic battle over money.

Mesopotamian history is hard to match. Writing was invented here with the wedge-shaped cuneiform impressions in clay. The first urban centers developed here. In a building with artifacts 6,000 years old, the speakers from the relatively nascent United States took pains to show that they value heritage. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker called the aid program an "investment" in the world's heritage and "10,000 years of human history." But all that history is a heavy burden to carry.

By Lennox Samuels

Foreign and Iraqi observers alike have been noting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s increasingly assertive conduct, dating back to his ambitious operation last March to wrest control of Basra from militias that had reduced the southern city to chaos. But even veterans of Iraq’s Byzantine politics are wondering what brought the prime minister to issue a decree this week declaring that ministers and various senior government officials may not travel outside the country until they get approval from him.

The decree, released by the National Media Center, says ministers must send a written request to the Cabinet’s secretariat-general and wait for approval. The order seems especially odd, because the government officials have already been bound by this rule for the past year. Some speculate that this is a rebuke to one of the approximately three dozen Cabinet ministers, who are from a variety of political parties, who might have wandered abroad without permission.

It is not clear who that might be, although Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani has been in London meeting with representatives from 35 energy companies to discuss development and exploration in Iraq’s oil industry. In June, the oil ministry opened six oil fields and two gas fields for international bidding, a move expected to lead to the return of foreign oil companies to the country 36 years after they were expelled by Saddam Hussein.

Maliki’s order may have nothing to do with Sharistani, a nuclear scientist who was imprisoned for a decade during Saddam’s regime for refusing to work on developing an atomic bomb. But there is said to be no love lost between the fellow Shiites. Shahristani is considered too independent and regarded as someone who may not support the prime minister’s program. The minister travels frequently in his bid to develop the oil sector.

On the other hand, Maliki also has feuded with the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd who also travels a lot, and he has clashed with other members of his sometimes dysfunctional Cabinet. So, why he felt the need to issue a reminder – and via a publicly released decree – remains unclear.

Grand Ayatollah Sayed Ali Husseini Sistani has had some ups and downs lately but he's still the most influential person in Iraq. The latest reminder came today when he signaled–signaling is about as explicit as he gets on these kinds of issues–that he would not oppose the status of forces agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the United States.

Sistani is, based on his years of scholarship and selection by other clerics, the highest ranking Shiite in Iraq and possibly the world. Though he stays away from daily politics, especially compared to his counterpart clerics in Iran, he changed the course of the American occupation of Iraq by advocating for elections in 2005 and his consistent calls for patience have kept the country's Shiite majority from turning against the United States presence.

But with the rise of violent militias led by radical young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his own occasional long periods of public silence, it had seemed the Sistani's clout among the Shiite faithful had crested. A few months ago, rumors circulated that the reclusive cleric, who's about 78 years old, was in a coma. He responded by inviting local reporters to his compound, in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, to show them he was well. He also suffered the indignity last month of having his organization's Website hacked and defaced with anti-Shiite diatribes.

But Iraqi leaders still cannot make a major decision without getting Sistani's nod and implied support. Friday Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki went to Sistani's compound and talked to the cleric for about two and half hours about the future of the U.S. presence in Iraq. U.S. officials planned for a deal by July 31 but the haggling continues. Most of the terms are already on paper pending final points of contention, especially concerning who will prosecute U.S. soldiers accused of crimes and they seem to be good enough for the Ayatollah. Maliki told reporters after the meeting that Sistani had agreed to back whatever his government and the parliament adopt. The Shiite Prime Minister also noted that the current proposal sets a December, 2011 deadline for a troop withdrawal, something Sistani is believed to seek.

Today Sistani's office confirmed his stance in the usual way – authorizing an aide to issue a statement to reporters. It gave the Iraqi leadership the green light. "His Eminence accepts what they accept," said the statement. Typically, in saying little he said a lot.

–With Hassan Al-Jarrah reporting in Najaf.

Every Ramadan, in neighborhoods around Baghdad, groups of men face off in the streets. But they are engaged in a battle of wits, not arms, as they play a game called "mahaibis" or "little ring." One team cloaks itself behind a large cloth and hides a ring in the fist of one of its players. Then they all sit, their clenched fists on their laps, as a member of the opposing team tries to guess which player holds the ring and which hand it's in. He (the teams are almost always all-male) has a few minutes to scan each face, looking for telltale signs of nervousness or artificial nonchalance.

The searcher moves with swagger and showmanship, slapping the hands of those he eliminates from consideration among the dozens there to confound him. If he's wrong, and dismisses someone who actually holds the ring, the hiding team gets a point. If he's right, he continues the search to the cheers of his partisans, employing bravado and confusing banter to shake his adversaries' nerves. When he finally settles on his choice, he'll grab the suspect hand in a dramatic flourish. If he's chosen correctly, his teammates exult; they then get to hide the ring and try to win points by baffling the other team's designated hunter.

America might have had a less perilous time in Iraq if its diplomats and soldiers had come armed with the kind of skills Iraqis learn from childhood in this holiday game of subterfuge. Iraqis who are good at it use their uncanny powers of observation to read opponents' faces and gestures in divining, quite literally, who is hiding something.