Western military powers are watching how U.S. commanders fare in Iraq, which is showing the limits of what conventional armies can do in the face of guerrilla insurgencies.
"The conflict environment of the early 21st century certainly does represent a new era in warfare: but not the era that Western military planners expected," the International Institute of Strategic Studies said.
By Claudia Parsons and Andrew Quinn
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi voters have ratified a new U.S.-backed constitution despite opposition in Sunni Arab areas where insurgents are fighting the Baghdad government, officials said on Tuesday.
Iraq's Electoral Commission, revealing final results from the October 15 referendum, said 79 percent of voters backed the constitution against 21 percent opposed in a poll split largely along Iraq's sectarian and ethnic lines.
Several Shi'ite and Kurdish regions voted between 95 and 99 percent "Yes"; in rebellious, Sunni Anbar 97 percent said "No".
At least one Sunni leader complained of "massive fraud" but U.N. and Iraqi election officials said the vote was fair.
The results came as the U.S. military death toll in Iraq rose to 1,999 -- closing on the headline-grabbing 2,000 mark expected to spur new calls for U.S. President George W. Bush to outline an exit strategy for the Iraqi conflict.
Anti-government insurgents, who struck in dramatic fashion on Monday with a triple suicide bomb attack on a Baghdad hotel complex used by foreign journalists, pressed the offensive on Tuesday with new bomb blasts in Baghdad and the normally tranquil city of Sulaimaniya, killing at least 11 people.
The constitution's final results confirmed that only two of Iraq's 18 provinces, the insurgent stronghold of Anbar in the west and Saddam Hussein's home region of Salahaddin, had mustered a "No" vote of at least two-thirds -- one short of the three provinces necessary to veto the measure nationally.
The northern province of Nineveh, thought to represent a third possible "No" due to its large population of Sunni Arabs, ended up with only a 55 percent of voters rejecting the charter.
BOOST FOR WASHINGTON
Passage of the constitution is a boost for Washington and the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government in Baghdad, paving the way for a parliamentary election on December 15 that both hope will mark Iraq's emergence as a stable, federal democracy.
But much will depend on Sunni Arabs, who represent 20 percent of Iraq's population and have fought the U.S.-backed political process as a plot to deprive them of power and access to Iraq's oil wealth in Shi'ite and Kurdish-dominated areas.
Proof of Sunni anger was displayed this week with the bombing of Baghdad's Palestine and Sheraton hotels, the base for several international media organisations and a symbol of the foreign presence in the capital since the 2003 invasion.
The bombings, at dusk in front of rolling television cameras that guaranteed global media coverage, broke a relative lull in insurgent violence over the past two weeks.
Body parts were still strewn outside the hotel complex on Tuesday morning after the blast, which police said killed at least 12 Iraqis and injured 22.
On Tuesday, a suicide car bomber targeted a U.S. military convoy in Baghdad's Mansour district, killing one civilian and injuring five, police said. A roadside bomb exploded near one of Baghdad's children's hospitals, killing one person and injuring another.
In the northern city of Sulaimaniya -- a Kurdish area rarely troubled by the violence of the past two years -- another car bomb killed at least nine people, hospital sources said.
AL QAEDA
Iraq's National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie blamed the hotel attack on Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq -- a militant group that has claimed responsibility for spectacular attacks including the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad.
"This attack had all the fingerprints of Zarqawi all over it, the way it was planned and the timings between the bombs. We have seen evidence that the plan was to bomb through the hotel defences and then kidnap foreign journalists," he told Reuters.
"We have seen evidence that a small unit of men was planning to invade the hotel. But the Iraqi security forces did a great job," he said, although he did not say what that evidence was.
Other security experts have questioned that theory.
The official U.S. death toll in Iraq increased by two to 1,999 on Tuesday as the military announced that two marines had been killed last week by a roadside bomb in the town of Amariya outside Falluja, where Sunni insurgents are active.
The U.S. death toll has become an issue of increasing political significance in Washington amid waning public support for the conflict.
Western military powers are watching how U.S. commanders fare in Iraq, which is showing the limits of what conventional armies can do in the face of guerrilla insurgencies.
"The conflict environment of the early 21st century certainly does represent a new era in warfare: but not the era that Western military planners expected," the International Institute of Strategic Studies said.
(additional reporting by Michael Georgy, Alastair Macdonald, Waleed Ibrahim, and Hiba Moussa)
