The Kansas City Star January 25, 2005
Vote will be step toward freedom
By E. Thomas McClanahan
What's likely to happen when Iraqis vote in elections five days from now? I called a couple of Washington defense-policy analysts to get their sense of how things might unfold.
John Pike of Globalsecurity.org -- one never shy with a prediction -- offered what seemed the most likely scenario.
"A lot of people will vote," he said. "There will be more people voting than we expect (in the Sunni areas). There will be a lot of violence. You're going to wind up with an entity dominated by Shia politicians, with a substantial underrepresentation of Sunnis. But they won't be completely excluded."
The elections are likely to be far from perfect, but they will produce a government with more legitimacy than the current regime.
And after that? Predictions of civil war also seem overplayed. The Shiite leadership, dominated by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, has played its cards well. For decades, Iraqi Sunnis have ruled through brutality and intimidation, but so far the Shiites have refrained from widespread score-settling.
The Shiites know that with 60 percent of the population, elections will allow them to dominate Iraqi politics. But they have little incentive to completely stiff either the Kurds or the Sunnis.
Here's why: The Jan. 30 election will fill the seats of a 275-member National Assembly. That body will name a president and write a permanent constitution.
The constitution must be ratified by the Iraqi people, and in that election -- expected this fall -- Kurds and Sunnis will have heft beyond their numbers. If two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces reject the constitution, it will fail. The current, interim constitution will remain in effect and elections will be held for a new parliament.
Meanwhile, the insurgency will drag on, probably with dwindling strength as more Sunnis accept the "new Iraq" and become less tolerant of the mayhem and bloodshed caused by the terrorists.
Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute suggests a parallel with the end of apartheid in South Africa. The Baathist holdouts who dominate the insurgency must reach a psychological point similar to that reached by the white South Africans, he said. They must accept that the numbers are against them and winning is impossible.
Insurgencies are defeated only slowly, step by step. The battle to clear Fallujah of terrorists was an important step. The election will be another step, and certainly not one in which success can be assured.
But absolute peace and security are not essential for a reasonably effective election. Elections took place during the American Civil War. In 1982, voters in El Salvador turned out by the hundreds of thousands, despite sniper fire and, in some cases, bombs exploding near polling places.
What's most impressive is the tremendous yearning for democracy displayed by so many Iraqis.
A recent poll by an Iraqi newspaper found that nearly 80 percent of Iraqis in the Baghdad area planned to vote.
Another poll by the International Republican Institute, an entity funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development, reported a similar result: 80 percent of the respondents said they were likely or very likely to participate.
Last week in the United States, thousands of Iraqi expatriates traveled to one of five registration centers scattered around the nation. Many were forced to drive for several hours. Some made round trips of up to 1,800 miles.
"I would drive 10 hours, 20 hours -- I would drive to California -- to have my vote counted for once," Saad Algharabi of Jacksonville, Fla., told The New York Times.
In Baghdad, blogger Ali Fadhil acknowledged that the elections in Iraq will probably be bloodier than the elections in Afghanistan, where there were few attacks on polling places.
"The stakes are too high (for the terrorists), just as they are for us," Fadhil wrote recently on his Web log ( www.iraqilibe.blogspot
For months, Washington debated whether the Iraqi elections should be postponed because of the insurgency -- but postponing the elections would have only intensified the insurgency. Sunday, Iraqis will take a big step away from two generations of rule by brutality.
© Copyright 2005, The Kansas City Star
