Baby And Baathwater

On Sunday, January 16, George W. Bush asserted that his administration had done everything right in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was gone and Iraq was inching its way towards democracy. A few days later, during her confirmation hearings, the new secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, faithfully echoed her master's voice. Is there any truth in this cosy belief or are we looking at the Mount Everest of self-deceit?

Bush II is pinning its hopes on the elections scheduled for January 31. The President and his advisors have it all worked out—the elections will bring a 275-member national assembly which will write a new constitution, under which fresh election will be held. That will throw up Iraq's first democratic parliament and first genuinely free and democratic administration. This regime will have the legitimacy to isolate the extremists and eject the foreign militants. In time, a new age will dawn on the sands of Mesopotamia.

The only fly in this unguent is the rising tide of violence. Americans are being killed and wounded at the rate of 800 a month; casualties among the Iraqi security forces raised by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Allawi interim government run into the thousands. More ominously, violence is spreading as the elections draw near. Spokesmen for Bush II attribute this to a last-ditch attempt by Saddam loyalists, Ba'ath party remnants and foreign fanatics to scuttle the elections and prevent the return of lawful self-rule. Implicit in this is the assumption that people will accept things once the elections are successfully held and an elected government takes power, the violence will magically start to abate. While President Bush was not as optimistic as his former secretary of state Colin Powell, who predicted that American troops would come home by the end of 2005, both he and Rice are confident that Iraqi security forces will progressively take over the policing of their own country. There will be no need to increase the American presence or expand the army and the National Guard. Eventually, the troops will come home.

The possibility that no one is prepared to entertain is that—Iraqis will not accept the results of the election as genuine, even if they are held. This will happen if they come to the conclusion that the elections have been expressly and cunningly designed to yield a predetermined result. The belief that the Americans do not want to relinquish control ran deep even before the interim constitution was announced last year. The US had ignored Iraqi and international advice to hold early elections on one pretext or another for the previous 15 months. When Jay Garner, the first head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, advocated an early election as the only way of arresting the rise of resistance to the occupation, he was summarily dismissed. The electoral arrangements announced on June 15, '04, by Paul Bremer confirmed their fears.

Ignoring the advice of Iraqi members of the governing council and other notables, on June 15, Bremer replaced a constituency-wise first-past-the-post voting system (with which Iraqis were familiar), with a single national list-based system of proportional representation. Every party that wished to contest was asked to prepare a national list. The number of seats it gains would be determined by its share of the national vote. The order in which the names appeared would determine which candidates got elected.

This system has been welcomed by the UN and the European Union on the grounds that it will prevent the small parties from being wiped out and give them a say in the making of the Constitution. Since the EU is at home with proportional representation and the director of the UN's department for electoral assistance, Carina Perelli, is also a European, this is understandable.But the list system has also made it fatally easy to control who gets elected. The Allawi government and its American mentors only have to 'influence' the list-makers in each party.

The list system has also enabled the contenders to bring a large number of expatriates onto the ballot. One family's reaction captured by the media was: "We don't know any of these people. Whom are we to vote for?" The sudden change on June 15 therefore reinforced the suspicion among Iraqis that genuine self-rule was not among the goodies that the US wanted to leave behind.

As if that were not enough, the UN, backed by the US, has also made elaborate provisions to ensure that all 'overseas Iraqis' are able to vote. Many Iraqis suspect this is aimed at swamping the 'local vote' with an expatriate vote consisting of people who hate Saddam on principle but have not gone through either the American invasion and its horrors, or much of the 12 years of systematic torture through sanctions that preceded it.

To ensure that the expatriate vote is as large as possible, the eligibility criteria have been kept absurdly lax. Even those born outside Iraq will be allowed to vote, provided the father is/was an Iraqi. Hence, there are no fewer than four million expatriate voters against the Iraqi electorate of 12 million. Thus, if even 50 per cent of the resident Iraqis vote, they will be in effect be swamped by the expatriates.

The Iraqis know all this. So no matter how the elections turn out, it is a foregone conclusion that a substantial proportion will claim they've been cheated of victory or adequate representation. Were that to happen, the violent resistance will continue and, in all probability, gain strength. The new government will have no option but to continue leaning on the Americans because, as a senator told Rice at her confirmation hearing, the reliable Iraqi Security Force members number not 1,00,000 but 4,000. For the US, the Iraqi quagmire will grow more treacherous. For the Iraqis, the nightmare will continue.