Iraqi Vote May Be Just the Beginning

For months, President Bush and other U.S. officials have heralded Iraq’s election of a transitional government as a major goal in the struggle to achieve democracy and stability there.

But with the vote now just two weeks away, U.S. and Iraqi officials have begun to focus on the daunting problems they will face the morning after election day -- ones every bit as formidable as those they have faced since the invasion. Among them are a probable Shiite Muslim-led government that may ask for assurances that U.S. troops will leave the country, a Sunni minority that is likely to feel even more disenfranchised, a long process of drafting a constitution that tries to knit the country back together and an insurgency that may even gather strength.

“We don’t see the election itself as a pivotal point,” Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of State, said last week. “It is a part of the process. In fact, one could say it’s the beginning of a process.”

Bush administration officials expect the new Iraqi government to ask for a specific schedule for the withdrawal of the 173,000 U.S. and other foreign troops in the country. Leaders of the Shiite Muslim coalition that is expected to win first place in the balloting have publicly promised voters they will press for such a timetable.

The administration believes the new government will settle for a schedule based on military criteria -- one under which U.S. units would withdraw only once Iraqi security forces were ready to take their place -- rather than a rigid calendar.

As the election’s likely results come into focus, even optimistic members of the administration are conceding that Sunni turnout will almost surely be well below 50%. One administration official involved in planning efforts said that if 25% of Sunnis turned out, that would be considered a good showing. More worrisome would be “5% to 6%,” he said.

Sunni Arabs are thought to make up roughly 20% of Iraq’s population. Shiites make up about 60% and ethnic Kurds 16%. Although most Kurds are also Sunnis, they have their own language and culture, and their political orientation is ethnic, not religious.

Although Sunni Arabs are a minority, they dominated Iraq under former President Saddam Hussein. Since he was toppled, they have lost much of their power and access to government-controlled jobs and perks.

If only a small percentage of the Sunni Arab population turns out to vote, it is likely to fuel the insurgency, according to most experts who study Iraq. The logic goes that if Sunnis feel they are left out of the power-sharing, they will be less likely to stand up against the insurgency. Some may join it actively, while others may simply look the other way when the insurgency carries on its activities in their backyard.

The best-case scenario is that the insurgency remains unchanged -- and even that is a grim picture. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday in an interview with the PBS program “NewsHour” that the election would do little to defuse the violence. “It is a raging insurgency, and we are not trying to dismiss it or downplay it,” he said.

“The insurgency is not going away as a result of this election. In fact, perhaps the insurgents might become more emboldened” if they succeed in keeping turnout low, Powell said, voicing what other officials said was the administration’s worst-case scenario.

Some experts see the possibility of an even more dire outcome.

“Who knows if there will be an imminent civil war, but low Sunni participation further raises the prospects for it because positions harden after an election,” said Bathsheba Crocker, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the private Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Administration officials, however, are counting on the election to increase the legitimacy and popularity of the Iraqi government, which now is widely viewed as a tool of U.S. interests. The administration reasons that the insurgents will have more difficulty rallying support if the government is selected by popular vote.

“The illegitimacy of the current government will have been removed,” said a State Department official. “That particular moral legitimacy of the insurgents will have been brought into question.”

It is unclear that an election dominated by Shiites would undermine the rationale for the insurgency. Shiites appear to be playing a small role in the insurgency, and most of the active participants as well as the community that accepts the revolt are Sunni Arabs.

Administration officials say they are working on scenarios that would bring some Sunni Arab voices into the new government even if they do not win many seats in the transitional national assembly.

Under the proportional system being used, Iraqis will vote for slates, which will be allotted seats in the assembly based on how many votes they get. Thus, if only a small proportion of Sunnis vote, they are likely to win only a few seats in the assembly. Although it is possible that some Sunnis might vote for Shiites and some Shiites for Sunnis, it is widely expected that such crossover voters will be relatively few.

Leading Shiites and Kurds, who are also expected to play a major role in shaping the next government, are quietly discussing how to give the Sunnis a measure of power through political appointments, which would be made by the prime minister, the three-person presidency council and the assembly. There is also likely to be an effort to ensure that Sunnis continue to play a role in the new Iraqi security forces, although there are already signs that Shiites would like to reduce the Sunni visibility and power in those key jobs.

For Shiites, however, there may be little incentive to be generous. For nearly 30 years, they were shut out of most ministries, which controlled jobs, contracts and other government-funded favors. Now, for the first time, Shiites have a chance at those perks.

“What’s the incentive for Shiites to negotiate?” asked Thomas Carothers, director of the democracy project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

With dozens of Shiite parties, several of them quite large, it may not be easy to persuade rank-and-file party members that jobs should be given to the Sunnis who oppressed them for decades. The Bush administration is counting on some of the more sophisticated leaders to prod lower-level actors.

A likely sore point will be control of the country’s security services. Some Shiite political figures have already laid down markers, saying that they want to review the credentials of higher-level officials who have command responsibilities in the Iraqi military, the Iraqi national guard and the police. Others have asked to have more security jobs filled with southern Iraqis, who are overwhelmingly Shiites, a move that could put many former members of Shiite militias, who are feared by Sunnis, into powerful roles.

“There are officers in the army, the ING and Iraqi police from the old regime ... and we know there are security penetrations ... where there is harmony between the insurgents and some senior officers in the army and the police and that is why some regions were controlled by the gunmen,” said Ridha Taqi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shiite political group.

The issue of U.S. forces will also come to the fore quickly, and could become a major point of tension between the new Baghdad government and the U.S. administration that helped bring it into being. Powell and other U.S. officials have said that if the new government asked American troops to leave, the troops would go.

However, the interim Iraqi government has acknowledged that it still needs U.S. and other foreign troops to battle the insurgency and train Iraqi military and police forces -- and the new regime will quickly recognize the same reality, administration officials say.

“No one is going to be trying to negotiate with the multinational forces to get out,” one official said. “They are not ready to have us leave. But frankly, after the election, it makes sense to come up with a timetable.”

Iraq’s new politicians “will want to get the U.S. to leave.... It would be a very popular political position,” Crocker said. “But the practical reality is that we have to stay.”

Pentagon officials have refused to predict how long it will take to train enough Iraqi security forces to enable a significant drawdown in U.S. troops. The pace of training so far indicates that it will take at least two years to reach the Pentagon’s goals of about 135,000 trained police, 62,000 Iraqi national guard members and 24,000 Iraqi army troops. The current levels of personnel “trained and on hand,” according to figures released Jan. 12, are about 53,000 police, 40,000 national guard and 4,000 army.

“It is all too clear that Iraqi forces will remain a fraction of what is needed through at least mid-2005 and probably deep into 2006,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a recent report on the training program.

On PBS, Powell said, “I would like to see our troops come out as quickly as possible. The Iraqis would like to see our troops come out as quickly as possible. But it’s not possible right now to say that by the end of 2005, we’ll be down to such and such a number.”

On all these issues, Carothers said, the Jan. 30 election was unlikely to be the key to a solution. More important would be whatever political process occurred afterward.

“We’ve been relying on elections to produce results that normally require negotiations first,” he said, referring to the hoped-for division of power between Shiites and Sunnis. “We’ve been relying on elections to produce a working political compromise. But elections don’t really do that. Elections are usually the product of a political compromise.

“The question is: Can the process after the election serve as Iraq’s delayed negotiations toward a compromise?”