Prediction: No Election in Iraq

By Crispin Sartwell

Here's why I don't think here will be free and fair elections in Iraq in January.

The American occupation is not popular. I'm betting that it will quickly become evident that Iyad Allawi or whomever is the American-backed candidate cannot win. If that happens, I predict we will not let the election go forward. Simple as that.

We have the country under occupation. This occupation could receive "legitimacy" from an election. In Afghanistan, we are perfectly happy with elections because our candidate, Hamid Karzai, won. And we could run the risk, because whoever was going to win, it was not going to be the Taliban or al Qaeda.

But if a government were elected in Iraq that is hostile to the occupation - for example if it has ties to Muqtada al-Sadr - an already extremely difficult situation quickly mutates into impossible.

All anybody has in the way of a plan for Iraq is to quickly train tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and turn counter-insurgency operations over to them. Under the best of circumstances, this is unlikely to work at all, and if it works it will take many years. But if the government under which these troops operate is sympathetic to the insurgency, this plan becomes absolutely impossible.

If there is a Shia government, it will attempt to block any pacification in Shia areas, though it could take action in the Sunni triangle. But if it does, the Sunni insurgency will take on more and more momentum and have a better and better claim to represent the Sunni people of Iraq. Then the Fallujah of today will look happy and peaceful and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will have hundreds of enthusiastic recruits to the cause of Wahabbist terrorism.

In other words, the wrong result in the election will make Iraq completely ungovernable. We cannot permit that without admitting complete failure and going home in defeat.

Sadly, that's unlikely to be acceptable. So there are a few possibilities. One is covert ops, in which we try to undermine anti-American candidacies with strategies ranging from entrapment into scandal to assassination. If our track record is anything to go by, such a strategy will be a complete embarrassment, further destroying whatever shreds of credibility we have, or whatever shreds of admiration may exist for us in the rest of the world.

Another possibility is to run a completely fixed election: to refuse to recognize candidacies of which we do not approve or to stuff ballot boxes etc. If the idea is to establish some democratic legitimacy for the Iraqi government, this is obviously counter-productive.

The third possibility is to "delay," i.e. cancel, the election. And I suspect that it will quickly become apparent that this is the best option.

In the long run, we will never be able to allow a united Iraq to vote; the fundamental situation will remain unchanged.

It's going to quickly become apparent that the only possibility for a democratic Iraq is an Iraq consisting of three separate nations: Kurd, Sunni, and Shia.

We should have been thinking about partition from the outset, and I predict as soon as we seriously contemplate running an election for the whole country, the idea of partition is going to suddenly seem obvious.

We'd likely not be too happy with that result either. You might end up with a Shia theocracy in the south aligned with Iran, a fairly traditional Sunni autocracy in the Sunni triangle, and a Kurdish state in conflict with Turkey.

Then the strategy would have to be to keep these smaller states weak, keep them from becoming staging grounds for terrorist or military operations. That is a whole lot easier, though, than keeping a united and rebellious Iraq under permanent occupation.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.