Sunday, January 09, 2005
Iraq: At Last a Good Reason to Postpone the January 30 Elections
Two pieces on today’s Op-Ed page continue to hammer away at what the authors assume to be the foolishness of holding the election this month. The general argument believed by many in the American opposition (including unfortunately Brezezinski) see our policy misguided partly because they assume that it will inevitably lead to a theological state, possibly one dominated by Iran. For regular readers here, I do not need to argue this issue again: a Shiite controlled state is not necessarily a theocracy. I do, however, believe that the Kurds will not allow this to happen in any event. Their leaders are quite secularist and would find such a state cramping, even if not theological.
A more serious argument against moving doggedly ahead is put forward to Larry Diamond, an old friend who had a part in the early arrangements for a democracy program in Iraq. Larry believes that an essential mistake was the idea to have only one district with proportional voting. He claims that he and many fellow experts on democracy opposed this. The decision came in part from the UN, but perhaps Bremer had a part in it. It was argued at the time that trying to divide the country into districts would be too time consuming and lead to too many political squabbles (which noticing what happens in the U.S. does not seem unlikely). There also was a desire by the Shi'a leadership to have many overseas voters, a desire hard to fulfill in a the country newly divided into geographical election districts.
What Diamond brings to the discussion that is new is the fact that many Sunni groups have been meeting regularly to develop a common strategy for getting the election postponed. One of their planks is to try to get the single district approach rescinded so that geographical representation based on districts might be instituted. They feel that if the election planners could do this, then after several months districts would have been created and voting could proceed district by district. In this case, the Sunni districts would receive the representation that the government records would show that they should get and not the representation given by a light vote. (That is, if Baghdad had 20% of the population but only 10% of the vote, it would still receive representation as though it had 20% of the vote with the geographical district approach.) He claims that the main Sunni leaders have agreed that if the voting is postponed for a few months and the districts established, then they will rescind their call for a boycott of the election. If all this is true, he makes a good case. Now we have to see if Allawi or the Americans currently calling the shots (pardon the expression) in Iraq will listen.
A more serious argument against moving doggedly ahead is put forward to Larry Diamond, an old friend who had a part in the early arrangements for a democracy program in Iraq. Larry believes that an essential mistake was the idea to have only one district with proportional voting. He claims that he and many fellow experts on democracy opposed this. The decision came in part from the UN, but perhaps Bremer had a part in it. It was argued at the time that trying to divide the country into districts would be too time consuming and lead to too many political squabbles (which noticing what happens in the U.S. does not seem unlikely). There also was a desire by the Shi'a leadership to have many overseas voters, a desire hard to fulfill in a the country newly divided into geographical election districts.
What Diamond brings to the discussion that is new is the fact that many Sunni groups have been meeting regularly to develop a common strategy for getting the election postponed. One of their planks is to try to get the single district approach rescinded so that geographical representation based on districts might be instituted. They feel that if the election planners could do this, then after several months districts would have been created and voting could proceed district by district. In this case, the Sunni districts would receive the representation that the government records would show that they should get and not the representation given by a light vote. (That is, if Baghdad had 20% of the population but only 10% of the vote, it would still receive representation as though it had 20% of the vote with the geographical district approach.) He claims that the main Sunni leaders have agreed that if the voting is postponed for a few months and the districts established, then they will rescind their call for a boycott of the election. If all this is true, he makes a good case. Now we have to see if Allawi or the Americans currently calling the shots (pardon the expression) in Iraq will listen.
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