The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Media Credit: Raj Joshi/The University News [Click to enlarge]

Less than two weeks from now, some Iraqis will be participating in what is being billed as the most democratic election since the creation of the Iraqi state. Despite the investment of hundreds of thousands of our troops and hundreds of billions of our dollars, most Americans don't understand what is actually taking place Jan. 30 or how it fits into the rebuilding of Iraq.

Contrary to popular belief, the elections will not lead to any sort of closure in Iraq. In reality, it is just another in a long line of supposed "watershed events," such as the capture of Saddam Hussein or the June 30 transfer of power to the Iraqi Interim Government, events that have consistently failed to quell the violence.

What the Iraqis are voting for is not a single leader, but more of a continental congress. When Iraqis vote they will be selecting 275 individuals who will then get together to create an Iraqi constitution, which will be submitted to the Iraqi people in a referendum in the fall of 2005. Assuming the Iraqi people accept the constitution they will then follow the guidelines set forth in their new constitution in order to select their actual government. If they don't, or they are deadlocked, they re-vote on the 275 representatives and start the process all over again.

What this means is that the vote on Jan. 30 is really the first of three elections Iraq will have to carry out in the next year. It is an ambitious challenge, but the details of this inherently difficult process are what set it up for disaster.

The first mistake is that the 275 representatives are being chosen nationally, instead from smaller local districts, where they would be better known and able to campaign. Smaller districts would have provided for a more reliable demographic representation, making the election more legitimate in the eyes of the Sunni Muslim minority.

The second is that instead of voting for individual candidates Iraqis are allowed to vote for one political party, each with a different number of political candidates running. At the time of this writing (18 days before the election) the majority of parties had not released their list of candidates due to security concerns.

And the security concerns are real. Election workers and polling places have come under frequent attack. Within the last 10 days both Baghdad's deputy police chief and provincial governor have been assassinated, along with the security chief for Iraq's election commission in Diyala province. It is a bit ironic that the man in charge of ensuring security for the elections is already dead. Security concerns have caused election observers to settle for monitoring the elections from Jordan, making this the first time an election of this sort has occurred without international monitors.

Then there is the basic question of legitimacy. The Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni group, has called for a boycott. Without a stake in the election, Sunni fighters, who seem to make up the core of the insurgency, are unlikely to respect the outcome.

In cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi, violence will make voting impossible. Voters will be easy targets for car bombings and drive-by shootings by insurgents, many of whom have made it clear that they see voting in an American-sponsored election as a form of collaboration.

Prime Minister Allawi announced recently that some Iraqi cities will not even have the opportunity to vote. That's like having a U.S. election without voting in New York or California. A State Department poll that went unreleased found that before the election has even happened only 12 percent of Sunnis say they will consider the results legitimate.

American troop levels, which were increased from 138,000 to 150,000 for the election, are unlikely to come down. All of the security that has been brought in for this first election will need to be in place for the second and third round later in the year.

With such little time before the election, it is clear that we are now stuck making the best of a bad policy. While successful elections are no guarantee of victory, failed elections are a guarantee of defeat. It's a shame the odds aren't in our favor.

Stephen Webber is a junior studying economics.

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