President George Bush has hailed the success of the Iraqi elections in tones befitting a messiah. "Today, the people of Iraq have spoken to the world and the world has heard the voice of freedom from the centre of the middle east.... Across Iraq...men and women have taken rightful control of their country's destiny and have chosen a future of freedom and peace." This assertion reflects either a boundless capacity for self-deception, or boundless contempt for the gullible public. For, barring a miracle of Iraqi statesmanship, if this election confers anything upon Iraq it will not be freedom and peace, but war, chaos and disintegration.
Many thoughtful observers in the West, among them John Kerry, the Democratic contender for the US presidency, have questioned the legitimacy of the polls. Their doubts are well-founded: the list system of proportional representation which was foisted upon the Iraqis was one they were not familiar with. Since most candidates' names were withheld, Iraqis did not know whom they were voting for. The election itself was held under a suffocating blanket of military 'protection' that made a mockery of the notion of freedom.
We in India know how difficult it is to hold elections in insurgency-affected areas, and the violence in Iraq was far more intense than anything that we have had to cope with, either in Punjab, the Northeast, or Kashmir. It was, therefore, only to be expected that the elections would be less than perfect. However, in trying to guard against the threat from the insurgents, the Americans chose a system that will certainly entrench the insurgency and increase the violence in the coming months.
They did this by replacing the simple majority voting system with proportional representation and then, less excusably, by treating Iraq as one constituency. More than a century's experience in Europe and recently in Israel has shown that proportional representation makes parties exaggerate their differences in order to snatch votes away from their political neighbours, instead of minimising them. This exaggeration hardens positions and makes compromise difficult. That is why it has worked well only in some European countries where there have been few fundamental, divisive conflicts. By contrast, in Fourth Republic France which was convulsed by the Algerian struggle for independence, it brought the spectre of civil war. In Israel, the need faced by both the parties to coopt the Right so as to form a government has played a large role in preventing a settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute.
In Iraq, proportional representation conspired with the candidates' anonymity to leave the people with one basis on which to decide whom to support. This was religion or ethnicity. There was, thus, no way in which such an election could have done anything but sharpen ethnic and religious differences between Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Kurds.
Treating the entire Iraq as one constituency ruled out the possibility of quarantining trouble spots when holding the elections, as we do in India. The need to hold elections in the entire country, therefore, became the justification for savage attacks on Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, Samara, and other centres of resistance in October. These attacks gave the insurgents thousands of new recruits and led to the intensification of militant attacks in the run-up to the elections.
But that was only a part of the damage a single national list did. It was obvious from the very first days after the fall of Saddam Hussein that a democratic Iraq would have to be a federal polity with at least three autonomous regions. But by treating Iraq as a single constituency the US, perhaps unintentionally, reinforced the unitary nature of the polity. To then expect a national assembly and a transitional government elected by the entire nation and dominated by the Shias to write a federal constitution that will give much of their power to federating units might be asking for just a little too much.
Much of the recent intensification of the insurgency can be traced to the fear of the Sunnis in central Iraq that use of a single national list would lead to their subjugation by the Shias, whom they had ruled for 500 years. By the same token, Shia leaders like Sistani saw in it a chance to capture power without fighting for it. This led to sporadic attacks on the Shias before the polls and to an election boycott by the two Sunni coalitions. The result, there will be almost no Sunnis in the National Assembly and the transitional government.
That has made it certain that this powerful community, to which 28 per cent of the Iraqis belong, will not accept the assembly and government the election throws up. The insurgency is, therefore, likely to grow. Since the hastily-formed Iraqi security forces cannot take on the insurgents, US and British troops will have to stay on indefinitely. The longer they stay, the more acute will be the strife. Since neither government can make an indefinite commitment, the moment their troops start pulling out Iraq will explode into a full-scale civil war.
The only way to avoid this is for the new government to include the Sunni leadership in the constitution and government-making process. But it will not be easy. The 'Sunnis' and 'Shias' are not divided so much by religion as by the intensity of their opposition to the US and British presence and to the Allawi government. Most of the sixty to hundred thousand civilians killed since the invasion were Sunnis. Thus, the departure of the invaders will be a precondition for national reconciliation. Since it is difficult to see the Bush administration agreeing to this, Iraq may well have to travel all the way down the road to civil war.