Commentary by Paul Flum – January 2005

As the Iraqi election on January 30 draws near, more and more people have come out in favor of a post-ponement. The security situation has deteriorated so badly, they say, that the election results will be so unsatisfactory, so incomplete, as to be rendered meaningless. The Bush Administration, however, remains adamant.

Recently, two wise and experienced foreign-policy experts spoke out. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor under President George H. W. Bush, joined Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter, at a sym-posium presented by the New American Foundation.

“The elections … have the great potential for deepening the conflict,” Scowcroft said. And they have the potential to trigger “an incipient civil war.” He believes the war and our occupation have inflamed the entire region against us.

Brzezinski is equally pessimistic. “I do not think we can stay in Iraq in the fashion we’re in now.” He thinks election will result in a Shiite theocracy. “Not what we would call a democracy.”

Iraq’s Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, guarded by U.S. security agent, arrives in Tikrit. Allawi acknowledges that there are parts of Iraq that would be too unsafe for voting in a January 30 election.

Postponement advocates believe an all-out civil war between the minority Sunni community and the Shiite majority could result from the lopsided election. Such an uprising would leave thousands of Americans caught in the middle of the crossfire.

The numbers tell the story. The Shiites are roughly 60 percent of the pop-ulation, and their many factions are now united within the United Iraqi Alliance, which has a full slate of candidates ready to sweep the January 30 elections.

The Sunnis, roughly 20 percent of the population, are the restless minority. The insurgency that is inflaming Iraq with daily violence springs from this community, and their foreign sup-porters. They have intimidated much of the moderate Sunni community to boycott the election – an act of self-inflicted disenfranchisement that could be the burning fuse that ignites the civil war.

The Kurds represent the final 20 percent, and are non-Arab Sunnis. If a civil war broke out, they might make a move toward complete independence.

The Administration argues that a postponement would represent a huge psychological victory for the insurgency.

This is a specious argument, and one that ignores the security crisis that is getting more perilous by the week, with or without an election. A sizeable portion of the Iraqi population is preparing to sit out this election, which will insure their exclusion from the decision-making body that will begin drafting the new constitution in February.

If the proportional representation will be lost with these election results, as the Shiites dominate the temporary general assembly, then perhaps a better way would be to postpone the election for now until a new framework could be put into play. Iraq already has 18 provinces that could serve as future states. Why not let each of these provinces elect two senators and representatives based on population to represent them in a national assembly. This would insure that all segments of the population feel involved and duly represented – majority rule complemented by minority rights.

If spreading democratic ideals around the globe, and especially in the Middle East, is the primary foreign-policy focus of the second Bush Admin-istration, then why not begin and end with our own model – the United States of Iraq?

Iraqis flee from terrorist car-bomb blasts in Baghdad

The old adage says, you break it, you own it. We started this war and occupation, and now we have to finish the job. Insisting on a flawed election, then rushing to the exits is not the answer.

We owe it to the Iraqi people to get this right! And we owe it to the families of every American serviceman and woman who have died or been injured in this adventure. Anything less would represent moral bankruptcy.

This paid advertisement was published in “RollCall” in January, 2005.

We called the shots in January 2005…

…and now ex-Prime Minister Allawi confirms our wisdom!

The New York Times OP-Ed Nov. 2, 2007

How Iraq’s Elections Set Back Democracy

By Ayad Allawi

IN the six weeks since Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker delivered their report to Congress on the situation in Iraq, there has been much criticism over the lack of progress made by the Baghdad government toward national recon-ciliation. Unfortunately, neither Wash-ington nor the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki seems to understand that reconciliation between Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups will begin only when we change the flawed electoral system that was created after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The paralysis that has afflicted the government in Baghdad, the sectarian disputes across the country and the failure to move toward reconciliation were all predictable outcomes of the senseless rush to hold national elections and put the Constitution in place. At the time, leaders from all major parties produced a memorandum calling for a delay of the elections, which I presented to Ghazi al-Yawer, then the interim president of Iraq.

Yet due largely to political pressure from the international community, the elections went ahead in January 2005, under a misguided “closed party list” system. Rather than choosing a specific candidate, voters across the country chose from among rival lists of candidates backed and organized by political parties. This system was entirely unsuitable given the security situation, the lack of accurate census figures, heavy intimidation from ethnic and religious militias, gross interventions by Iran, dismantled state institutions, and the use of religious symbols by parties to influence voters.

Accordingly, the vast majority of the electorate based their choices on sectarian and ethnic affiliations, not on genuine political platforms. Because many electoral lists weren’t made public until just before the voting, the competing candidates were simply unknown to ordinary Iraqis. This gave rise to our sectarian Parliament, controlled by party leaders rather than by the genuine representatives of the people. They have assembled a government unaccountable and unanswerable to its people.

How to fix this mess and bring Iraqis together as a true nation? We must begin with a fundamental re-examination of the electoral laws and the Constitution. This is not simply my opinion — it is shared by many of my colleagues in the Parliament’s Council of Representatives.

I propose that a new electoral law be devised to move Iraq toward a completely district-based electoral system, like the American Congress, or a “mixed party list” system like that in Germany, in which some represen-tatives are directly elected and other seats are allotted based on the parties’ overall showing. In either case, the candidates must be announced well in advance of the election, and they must be chosen to represent the people in their locality.

Furthermore, a new law should ban the use of religious symbols and rhetoric by candidates and parties — these have no place in democratic elections. In order to prevent inter-ference from militias and to ensure transparency, the United Nations must supervise all these elections district by district. And these reforms should be supplemented by other preconditions of national reconciliation, like general amnesty to all those who have not engaged in terrorism.

The next elections in Iraq are not scheduled to take place until late 2009 (unless the current government is removed by parliamentary means or a new general election is held at the request of a majority of the body). Whatever the fate of the Maliki government, the Council of Repre-sentatives must act fast to repeal the regulatory framework of the elections law and propose a new system to the independent electoral commission of Iraq that will ensure all Iraqis are granted an equal voice in their government.

This restructuring of the electoral process will be the beginning of the end of the sectarianism that now dominates Iraqi politics and our dysfunctional government. National reconciliation should be the most significant milestone set by the Bush administration, since this “benchmark” is far more important than the 17 others put forward by Congress this year.

Building democracy in Iraq will be a long-term process, established through the rule of law, a stable security environment, functioning state institu-tions and an emerging civil society. Success can be achieved if we act soon to bring about the fundamental reforms needed to provide for an Iraqi democracy with a parliament and government that are receptive to people’s needs. Only then can we build a country that will finally allow us to enjoy the freedom so many have paid for with their lives.

The alternative is continuing down the road we are headed, which leads directly to the disintegration of Iraq.

Ayad Allawi, the prime minister of Iraq from 2004 to 2005, heads the Iraqi National Accord Party.