Can Iraq Rule Itself?

YURI KOZYREV FOR TIME
Election posters hang all over Baghdad

(2 of 3)

Just look at the likely winners. The largest political group running in the election, the United Iraqi Alliance (U.I.A.), is a grab bag of parties that have little in common apart from a desire for power and a deep-seated distrust of U.S. motives. Backed by Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the supreme religious leader of Iraq's Shi'ite majority, the U.I.A. includes the country's strongest Shi'ite parties, among them the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (S.C.I.R.I.) and the Dawa Party, which have close links to Iran.

It also includes such wild cards as former Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi as well as representatives of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite leader whose militias were fighting pitched battles with U.S. troops less than a year ago.

In the absence of reliable nationwide opinion polls, predicting a victor in the Jan. 30 election is a fool's game. Even if the Shi'ite slate lives up to claims by its leaders that it has the backing of 60% of the country, it's hard to know who would emerge as the candidate for Prime Minister.

Speculation in the Iraqi media centers on three candidates, all considered religious moderates: the Dawa Party's Ibrahim al-Jaffari, S.C.I.R.I.'s Adil Abd al-Mahdi and Sistani protege Hussein Shahristani. Whoever gets the nod, Washington will find itself having to deal with a group that has no natural affinity with the U.S. "These are all people who have one reason or another to dislike America," says pollster Sadoun al-Dulame, executive director of the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies. "If George Bush has to do business with these people, well, good luck to him."

Even if the Administration's preferred candidate, Allawi, manages to hold on to the Premier job, the U.S. will no doubt find him less malleable than before. That's because the new Cabinet will be beholden not to the U.S. but to an elected Iraqi parliament. And since this body will represent the popular will, it's a good bet it will pressure the new government into populist gestures, including calling for an early exit of U.S. troops. "Even if it has the same faces, the next government will be very different from the interim administration," says al-Mahdi, who is the Finance Minister in Allawi's interim government. "The most powerful body will not be the presidency or the prime ministership or the Cabinet. It will be the Assembly." The first task of the 275-member legislature will be to select a President and two Vice Presidents, who in turn will name a Prime Minister. Although the Prime Minister is to wield a great deal of executive power, all major decisions will need to be cleared with the Assembly and the President, both of whom will have the power to dismiss the government. "The main thing is that Iraqis will be able to feel that, through the Assembly, they can put pressure on the government to address their concerns," says Dawa leader al-Jaffari, who served as one of two Vice Presidents in the interim administration. "The Assembly will take a lot of the decision-making power out of the Prime Minister's hands."

How will the new government tame the insurgency? Senior Iraqi leaders say Allawi's formula of tough talk, backed by U.S. military might, will give way to a more conciliatory approach. The consensus among leading politicians is that the only way to bring the Sunnis back into the political fold is to try to negotiate an end to the resistance. "This is the minimum we need to do in order to deal with the security situation," says Tawfiq al-Yasseri, general secretary of the secular National Democratic Coalition.

Leaders of the Shi'ites and the Kurds, who together make up 80% of the population and are likely to be disproportionately represented in the new Assembly, have promised to include Sunnis in the government.

Ensuring Sunni participation is crucial to the Assembly's most important task: writing a new Iraqi constitution, which must be drafted by Aug. 15 and put to a nationwide referendum by Oct. 15.

Sunnis in and outside Iraq fret that a Shi'ite-dominated Assembly might produce fears of an Iranian-style Shi'ite theocracy taking root in Baghdad. But Iraqi Shi'ite leaders have sought to allay those concerns by emphasizing that they will not press for velayat-e-faqih, or rule by the clergy, which is dreaded by Sunnis and secular Shi'ites. Sistani's group is mindful that the constitution can be scuttled if any three of Iraq's 18 provinces vote against it. Sunnis dominate four. One solution favored by Shi'ite leaders is to include prominent Sunni legal experts on the committee that will write the draft constitution. "The important thing is to ensure they get a fair say in the process," says al-Jaffari. "We can't leave them outside because that would just inflame suspicions that we're trying to write them out of Iraq's future."

Some Iraqi politicians speculate that the Shi'ites may even offer the presidency to a prominent Sunnipossibly the incumbent, Ghazi al-Yawer. (Others have suggested that it's the Kurds' turn to get the presidency, making Jalal Talabani the front runner.) Sunni political parties like the Iraqi Islamic Party have indicated that they may be open to some such accommodation if the terms are right.