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AS IRAQ'S ELECTION
DAY approaches, President Bush and some
commentators have spoken as though the mere march of
the calendar toward Jan. 30 is in itself a sign of
progress toward democracy. ''I suspect if you were
asking me questions 18 months ago and I said there's
going to be elections in Iraq,'' Bush told the White
House press corps on Jan. 7, ''you would've had
trouble containing yourself from laughing out loud
at the president. But here we are at this moment,
and it's exciting times for the Iraqi people.''
Despite a sharp debate in recent weeks over whether
to delay the balloting to allow for improved
security and to bring more Sunni Arabs into the
process, the administration has stuck firmly to the
timeline for the vote. Under the current plan, in
two weeks Iraqis will elect a 275-member
transitional National Assembly -- empowered to make
laws, choose a prime minister and president, and
write the nation's new constitution -- along with 18
provincial assemblies and a 105-member Kurdistan
National Assembly in the semi-autonomous Kurdish
north.
But what then? Most public discussion has focused on
the vote itself. Democracy, however, does not
consist simply of voting. If the elections proceed
on Jan. 30, and a reasonable degree of order is
maintained, there remains the question of what
happens on Jan. 31, when the work of governing
really begins.
When asked whether the elections can bring a
semblance of stability and democracy to the country,
Iraq experts and democracy scholars here in the
United States tend to fall along a continuum of
pessimism. Some, like Jon Alterman, director of the
Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, see the elections as
currently planned as ''one of many not very good
choices.'' Juan R.I. Cole, a professor of modern
Middle East history at the University of Michigan,
puts it more bluntly: ''It looks like these
elections are going to be a disaster.''
Elections have on occasion been held in unstable
countries (Afghanistan being a notable recent
example), but as James Dobbins, formerly the US
special envoy for Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia,
and Afghanistan, points out, ''I don't think that
we've ever tried to run an election in such an
insecure environment.'' Thomas Carothers, director
of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the
use of elections as a pacification mechanism is
highly unusual. ''Usually elections come after the
conflict as the final ribbon on the peace deal.''
Nevertheless, asked what a successful outcome might
look like, several of the experts were willing to
sketch out scenarios in which the elections could,
to some degree, work. If, through a combination of
luck and inspired politicking, the fledgling Iraqi
government finds a way to reach out to those who are
effectively disenfranchised by the election process
or distance itself, at least symbolically, from the
US, Iraq might still avoid the grim scenario of
ethnic warfare and chaos that even the most
optimistic observers acknowledge is an all too
realistic possibility
As many have noted, the transitional National
Assembly will not, in all likelihood, accurately
represent the political will or the ethnic make-up
of the Iraqi electorate. In these elections, turnout
will be an especially important indicator. Experts
note that without scientific polling, it's
impossible to know just how many Iraqis plan to
vote. Carothers suggests that anything above 60
percent -- approximately the turnout for the 2004 US
presidential election -- would be a sign of
substantial Iraqi faith in the electoral process.
(By comparison, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of
registered voters turned out for the Afghan
presidential election on Oct. 9.)
Yet the geographical distribution of the vote
matters more than the raw numbers. Rather than have
members of the National Assembly elected from each
province, the election will treat the entire country
as one electoral district, awarding seats to
parties, or coalitions of parties, on a proportional
basis. While this avoided the time-consuming and
contentious process of drawing electoral district
boundaries -- which, it was argued, would have made
voting by Jan. 30 impossible -- it also ensures that
any area with low turnout stands to be
underrepresented. The parties popular in the
predominantly Sunni Arab provinces, where the
insurgency is centered, are therefore likely to do
poorly. The formerly dominant Sunni Arab minority,
which accounts for roughly 20 percent of Iraq's
population (the Shia make up over 60 percent and the
Kurds approximately 20 percent), may very well find
themselves with only a handful of seats.
Noah Feldman, a professor at New York University Law
School who advised on the drafting of the interim
Iraqi constitution and has argued forcefully for the
potential of Islamic democracy, says that
expectations for a truly representative result
should be lowered in light of current conditions.
There's a chance, he argues, that in addition to low
Sunni participation, we might also see ''further
weird anomalies based on turnout.''
For example, while Shiites, at the urging of Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, are expected to vote in
large numbers, ''you might still have lower than
expected turnout in Shia areas because of
insecurity.'' That would favor voters in the largely
peaceful Kurdish north -- where turnout for the
Kurdish Assembly elections has traditionally been
around 90 percent -- and delegitimize the Assembly
in the eyes of the Shia. It would also embolden the
Kurds who, with the most powerful militias in the
country and barely concealed separatist ambitions,
might push for de facto independence, flirting with
civil war while angering neighboring Turkey and
Iran, countries with their own restive Kurdish
minorities.
Nevertheless, says Larry Diamond, a democratic
development specialist at Stanford University's
Hoover Institution and former senior advisor to the
Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, the
election will almost certainly be ''a thumping
victory'' for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Sistani-endorsed
coalition of mostly Shia parties. Yet a Shia-dominated
government will need to gain the trust of the
Sunnis, and perhaps even the Kurds, if it is to
maintain stability.
To do that, Diamond continues, Sistani's coalition
will need to hold a national roundtable meeting,
''where all the groups will get together and work
out some sort of power-sharing deal.'' Carothers
suggests that such a deal include ''offering some
substantial positions in the government to important
members of the Sunni parties.''
Feldman, for his part, proposes a more structural
solution: ''They could create an upper house of
parliament, like the US Senate, with guaranteed
representation of all provinces.'' Diamond's own
idea is to ''amend the provisional constitution so
that provinces that are underrepresented or not
represented will still have a presence on the
committee set up to draft the [permanent]
constitution.''
A more balanced government might even win over the
allegiance of some Sunnis who would otherwise side
with the insurgents. ''If you don't have some small
number of Sunnis in the government,'' Dobbins
argues, ''the battle between the government and the
insurgents starts to break down into a
straightforward ethnic war. But if Sunnis seem to be
represented in the government in a significant way
then that complicates things, and neighboring Sunni
countries might be less likely to support the
insurgents.''
But even a government with perfect ethnic balance
will still be vulnerable to the perception that it
is captive to the interests of the occupying
Americans. To remedy this, some experts predict, the
Iraqi government may seek a symbolic break with the
United States.
''We'll see a pronounced distancing of the new
government from the US, perhaps a timetable demanded
for US withdrawal,'' says Cole. Diamond agrees, and
even argues that the United States should already
have offered its own schedule for a withdrawal.
''I've been arguing for months that we should do
something like this because I think it would help to
dampen fears that the US intends to basically occupy
Iraq indefinitely.''
Such distancing from the United States, Feldman
says, could be used as a bargaining chip with the
insurgents. ''The government can say, ‘If you put
down your arms, we will kick out the Americans. If
you do not we will crush you in a way that will make
the Americans look like wimps.''' Feldman hastens to
add that he's not at all sure an Iraqi government
could make good on either promise. ''But the point
is they can offer both a much more accommodationist
and a much harsher line than we have,'' he says.
But according to Peter W. Galbraith, who served as
US ambassador to Croatia in the years after the
Bosnian War and then as a high official in the UN's
transitional administration in East Timor, the only
way forward is for the new Iraqi government to
relinquish its newfound power rather than flex it.
Galbraith, who supported the Iraq invasion on
humanitarian grounds, sees the entire idea of a
centralized Iraqi government as misguided and the
elections as irreparably flawed. Ultimate
sovereignty, as he sees it, should reside separately
with the Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds in a loose
tripartite confederation.
For Galbraith, the situation calls to mind
Yugoslavia after the Cold War. One reason it fell
apart, he says, ''is that Milosevic basically
refused to accommodate the desires for greater
autonomy on the part of the Slovenes and the
Croats.'' Similarly, he argues, the Bush
administration ''has been proceeding on the
assumption of a single Iraq, rather than
acknowledging the reality of a country with three
groups, with very different agendas, and first
trying to broker a deal among the groups'' before
trying to have an election.
Under those circumstances, Galbraith argues, you
could have ''at least a partial transition to
democracy.'' Instead, the current plan promises only
a ''bad news/bad news story.''
''The bad news is that the elections will be
engulfed in violence in a significant part of the
country and so they'll fail,'' says Galbraith. ''The
other bad news is that they will succeed and lead to
the break-up of the country.''
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com
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