The long-awaited Iraqi elections have turned into a political ping-pong game, writes Abbas Kadhim United States President George Bush, Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani may disagree on many things. Yet, they are unanimous in their conviction that the forthcoming Iraqi elections must be held on time. Meanwhile, the head of the Iraqi National Assembly, Fouad Masoum, has warned that even if the elections are not a free and fair process, they will be held nevertheless. Only the United Nations seems to be slightly more sanguine about the whole matter -- unsurprisingly, for the UN has nothing to lose in the case of delay, and nothing to gain from sticking to a schedule at all costs. In the course of these arguments and posturing, what seems to have been lost sight of is the fact that the electoral process is only a means to a higher end: ensuring fair access by citizens to governmental institutions. Unfortunately, the debate in Iraq and Washington seems to have identified the holding of elections as an end in itself, and as a result, no effort is being put into the knotty matter of devising the best possible institutions and institutional structures for the new Iraq. If asked today how their future government would actually operate, prospective Iraqi voters would probably respond with a blank look. Politicians can speak all they like about census and ballot problems, security at elections sites, and international monitoring: and of course, all of these are essential if the electoral process is to be a success. But it is disingenuous of those in power thus to divert the debate from substance to logistics. The transitional administrative law gives the people of Iraq a simple vote for a representative to the National Assembly. Beyond that, everything is going to be cooked up in private meetings. The president, his two vice-presidents and the prime minister will all be selected by political deal- making, in ways very similar to the deals that have been cut over the last several months. And indeed, the bargains that will be made in future are likely to be exacerbated by Iraq's current political structure. Political parties, religious powerbrokers and tribal interests, not the will of the people, are likely to be the deciding factors in the outcome of this process. None of these can be described as even remotely democratic. Existing Iraqi political parties largely revolve around the personalities of their bosses, and have little experience of any kind of transition of power. Some of these bosses have been in control ever since their party was founded, while others inherited the position from a deceased father or brother. Their internal hierarchy is thus based on family ties, amplified by tribal and personal loyalties. Rather than trying to make a clean break with the past, this model has been scrupulously translated into the new political system established to take the place of the ousted Baathist regime. When asked to appoint the new ministers, five of the members of the Governing Council saw nothing wrong with appointing a son, a nephew, or a brother-in-law. The most recent batch of Iraqi ambassadors is also tainted with nepotism. When it comes to lower level appointments, or to general employment throughout the country, the situation is even worse. The future government will also face the same difficulties which have plagued the interim regime. Violence is not likely to cease suddenly just because the ballots have been counted. For most of those who have taken up arms, elections do not figure high on their list of demands. All indicators suggest that the heavy foreign military presence in Iraq will continue, and with it, the cycle of violence and counter-violence. Unfortunately, this situation seems to suit the protagonists very well. President Bush has suggested to the American people that it is more convenient to have to deal with terrorists overseas than to face them on American soil. And the terrorists themselves also feel more comfortable operating in Iraq. They would rather confront the Americans in Falluja and Baghdad, than in New York and Los Angeles. The real question however is whether the Iraqis want their country to be turned into a battlefield for this confrontation between the forces of "good" and "evil". In a region like the Middle East, democracy is meaningless without force to back it up and protect it. Without a strong military and an efficient police, the future government of Iraq has only two options for survival -- and either of these will destroy its legitimacy. It can either become a client of a regional power, or agree to be a protectorate of the United States. If you still believe there is a "third way", then I suggest you take a good look around the region, and re-assess the political condition of the weaker states. It is not surprising, therefore, that speculation has begun to emerge about a possible civil war in Iraq if the "God-sent" foreign troops were to leave the country. Of course, no country is immune to civil war. The United States and Europe have known fratricidal conflicts in the course of their history, as have many countries in Africa and Asia. But in the case of Iraq, the threat of civil war is being used more as a scare tactic than as a faithful assessment of the state of affairs in the country. There are three reasons such a menace is being bandied about. First, it provides a way to justify the continuing presence of foreign troops in Iraq after the collapse of the entire ante-bellum rationale. Nevertheless, it is not self-evident that occupation forces would be any more useful than a national army if their main task was to protect Iraqis from each other. Secondly, some parties clearly hope to scare the Iraqis into accepting whatever future is falsely presented to them as the lesser of two evils. And thirdly, it is clear that many people, both in the West and in the region, want to see Iraq split into three states. For them, the civil war theory buttresses the analogy they want to draw with the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic and religious tensions soon led to catastrophic violence. The exponents of an Iraqi Balkanisation theory do not form a monolithic bloc. While some are interested in advancing this theory because of regional preferences, many are simply convinced that all human experiences resemble one another like peas in a pod, and that people will respond to similar stimulations with identical responses. Indeed, such theorists are legion in the academic world. They are the same people who spent months comparing the occupation of Iraq to that of Japan and Germany in the wake of World War II, and predicting a similar course of events -- never mind the differences in time, place and culture. Whatever the case might be, and despite all the risks posed by the still murky reality on the ground, we should bear in mind that those who are predicting civil war in Iraq have yet to see any of their earlier predictions come true, whether those they made before the war began, or since. Caveat emptor.
