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"Welcome to the world's
interrelated four-month, four-nation election cycle"
was the challenge posted here in October.
So far, voters who support implanting freedom in the
Middle East have won three in a row, electing
President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the American
ally John Howard in Australia, and George Bush here.
Now pessimists are trying desperately to call off
the fourth election - the one scheduled for late
January in Iraq to elect a 275-member national
assembly that will write a constitution - lest they
lose that vote, too.
For one awful moment last week, it seemed the
foot-draggers might succeed. The old Sunni Arab
politician Adnan Pachachi, who had been the U.N.'s
choice for interim leader last year but was roundly
rejected by Iraqis, convened a cabal of Sunni groups
worried about a Shiite majority. They sought to
appease violence by urging a six-month delay; that
would give Sunni insurgents time to regroup after
their Fallujah defeat and then escalate warfare to
push elections back forever.
This small gathering's consensus was reported as a
major impetus to delay the vote. Even more alarming
was the report that "the two main Kurdish parties
supported the delay request."
If true, that would be a stunner. Could it be that
the courageous Kurds, with 20 percent of the
population - and having been protected from Saddam's
genocide for the past decade by American and British
air power - were about to double-cross us and side
with the Sunni Baathists who had persecuted them?
On the phone, I put it to the top Kurd serving in
the interim Iraqi government, Deputy Prime Minister
Barham Salih: Were the Kurds chickening out?
"This whole story was an exercise in political
spin," he replied. As he had just told David Frost
on BBC, Iraq is not the calamity we see on
television. "I was supposed to be a Kurdish
representative to that meeting, but it wasn't
possible," Salih informed me. "A junior
representative took part. No decision was made, and
we did not endorse the delaying of the election."
No waffling?
"We have demonstrated our resolve in Fallujah,"
Salih said. "Holding the election will be tough, but
delaying it would be tougher. We will do everything
in our power to honor our commitment to free
elections."
Pachachi, the chief spinner of delay, means trouble.
At the Ambrosetti conference in Italy a year ago, I
saw him with Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League,
receiving instructions from Sunni Central. Pachachi
has long been in the pocket of the Saudi royals, and
a picture of him kissing the hand of the United Arab
Emirates ruler, Sheik Zayed, disgusted many Iraqis,
who blocked the U.N.'s choice. Instead, Iraqi
leaders chose Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite; now
Pachachi's pan-Arab crowd is out to avert elections
and bring back Sunni minority rule.
My bona fides with the Kurdish people go back a
generation, to friendship with their nationalist
patriot, Mustafa Barzani. Kurds were the open source
of a 2001 column reporting the presence of an
affiliate of al-Qaida, Ansar al-Islam, in northern
Iraq, where terrorists tried to kill Salih.
Hungry Kurds first told me of Saddam's oil-for-food
scam, and still remember Christer Elfverson, the
Swede who spent four years as the U.N. deputy to
Benon Sevan - a bureaucrat who saw no evil in the
denial of US$4 billion worth of food and medicine
owed the Kurds.
Today their pesh merga is the readiest and fiercest
Iraqi fighting force. In Iraqi uniform, these
mountain warriors are helping to pacify Mosul; they
want to avoid Kurd-Arab clashes, but a million Kurds
live in Baghdad and their trained compatriots will
defend them from terrorists.
It's simplistic to prognosticate the coming election
as 60 percent Shiite, 15 percent Sunni, 20 percent
Kurd, 5 percent other. Only half the Shiites and
Sunnis are fervent Islamists, while most of the
Kurds are secular Sunnis. The result is an Oliver
Hardy demographic: "a fine mess," susceptible to
democratic surprises by charismatic local
candidates.
The most important element in the two months leading
up to this fourth election is a sense of
inexorability. The U.N. may run, the Pachachi
reactionaries may drag a foot, the terrorists may
intimidate - but the vote must go on. Democracy
delayed is democracy denied.
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