Desperate to blow the election off course

Jan 5th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
Continuing a bloody campaign to disrupt Iraq’s upcoming parliamentary election, insurgents have assassinated the governor of Baghdad. The withdrawal of the largest Sunni Muslim party from the election on security grounds has led to more calls for its postponement—but so far it looks like being held as planned on January 30th

IRAQ’S insurgents have once again demonstrated their ability to strike at the heart of the country’s leadership, with the assassination of Ali al-Haidri, the governor of Baghdad province, on Tuesday January 4th. The governor and a bodyguard were killed when gunmen opened fire on his car, in the west of the capital. A statement apparently from a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an ally of al-Qaeda, said the governor was killed for being an “American agent”. Hours earlier, a suicide bomber killed eight Iraqi policemen and three civilians at a checkpoint near the high-security Green Zone, which houses the interim government and foreign embassies. On Monday, a suicide car-bomber killed two people while trying to crash through a roadblock near the headquarters of the Iraqi National Accord—the party of Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister—shortly before the party had been due to announce its list of candidates for the parliamentary elections on January 30th.

These were among the latest in a string of audacious attacks aimed at making Iraq so insecure that it is impossible to hold plausible elections. The insurgents are mainly drawn from Iraq’s Sunni Muslim Arabs, who make up only about a fifth of the country’s 26m population but have long been used to ruling the place, during Saddam Hussein’s regime and before. They know that a democratic vote would result in a government dominated by the country’s Shia Muslim majority. At least as bad from the insurgents’ viewpoint is that a successful election would help legitimise the American-led invasion of Iraq—and that the ensuing new administration might maintain good relations with America and ask its troops to stay.

A final defeat of the militants still looks very far off: this week, Mr Allawi's intelligence chief, Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani, told the French News Agency (AFP) he reckoned there were perhaps 200,000 insurgents (including those who provide logistics and shelter to the fighters), easily outnumbering the American troops in Iraq.

Last month, Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and an inspiration to some Sunni militants, urged them on by arguing that democracy itself is un-Islamic, because it means rule by the people, rather than by the Almighty. This theological viewpoint is clearly not shared by Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is pressing for the elections to go ahead on schedule, despite calls from moderate Sunnis, and even some leading Shias, for a delay.

On December 27th the Iraqi Islamic Party, a large and moderate Sunni group, became the latest to pull out of the elections and call for their postponement, on the grounds that the continuing violence, which is concentrated in Sunni-majority areas, made it impossible to conduct a fair vote. More-hardline Sunni groups, such as the Muslim Scholars' Board, have been adamant that they will not take part in an election while American-led forces continue to occupy the country.

But for mainstream Sunni Arabs, the decision has been harder. If they take part, they might come under attack from their more militant brethren, and the low turnouts in their heartlands might deny them fair representation in the new parliament. On the other hand, if they boycott the elections, their people might have no say at all in how the country is run.

With the insurgents stepping up their efforts to disrupt the election, and more mainstream Sunnis dropping out, there have been calls for a postponement even from among members of Mr Allawi’s interim administration. On Monday, the defence minister, Hazim al-Shaalan—a secular Shia, like the prime minister himself—said while visiting Cairo that he was asking Egypt to try to persuade Iraqi Sunnis to take part in the election but that if they continued to boycott it, then the vote should be put off. The chances of Egypt achieving such a turnaround in Sunni opinion (assuming it even tries) are not good. Speaking to Reuters news agency on Tuesday, Iraq’s interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni, called on the United Nations to consider having the election postponed. The next day, as the deadly attacks continued with the killing of at least 15 people at an Iraqi police academy, Mr Allawi insisted, for the umpteenth time, that there will be no postponement. In this he has America's and Mr Sistani's firm backing.

On balance, it still seems likely that the election will take place on January 30th in most parts of the country. Given the state Iraq is in, it is hard to predict how each of the various political coalitions will do. Mr Allawi heads the “Iraqi List”, a Shia-led alliance that includes the interim prime minister’s party and some moderate Sunnis. It promises ordinary Iraqis the law and order they crave. It faces a tough challenge from the United Iraqi Alliance, a Shia coalition whose leaders include Abdelaziz al-Hakim, a cleric close to Mr Sistani, and Ahmed Chalabi, a secular politician who used to be backed by Washington but has fallen out with his former Pentagon pals.

What America and its allies hope for is a repeat of last month’s election in Afghanistan, in which threats of widespread disruption by Islamist militants failed to materialise, and the American-backed interim president, Hamid Karzai, won a convincing mandate. Such a promising outcome is far from guaranteed in Iraq and, as in Afghanistan, would only be a first step towards stability. In both countries, the militant groups are far from finished and the reformed Iraqi and Afghan security forces are still weak, ill-trained and prone to desertions and infiltration. Afghanistan’s newly elected president and the elected parliament that Iraq is due to gain shortly will remain vulnerable for some time to those hell-bent on attacking both them and the concept of democracy itself.

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