Quotes of the Day

Democracy in Iraq is in the eye of the beholder. Some see in next week's national election a gleam of salvation after years of tyranny and occupation; others perceive the sharp threat of civil war. For the al-Saadi family in Baghdad, the Jan. 30 election can't come soon enough. "I'd like to go out and vote right now," says Karim, 43, an electrical-goods salesman who supports a family of 12.

His neighborhood, the hardscrabble district of Washash, home to a mainly Shi'ite population of laborers and small traders, is one of the few in Iraq's capital where a high voter turnout is predicted.

His mother Sabiha has lofty hopes for what an elected Iraqi government can achieve. "It will solve all our problems," she says.

"We will have electricity, my children will have jobs, and I won't have to worry about their safety when they go out."

A few miles across town, the outlook is far gloomier. In the mainly Sunni, middle-class neighborhood of Saidiyah, residents question not only what the election means but also whether it should take place at all.

Building contractor Omar Nasreddin, 47, says he intends to sit out the vote. Sunni clerics have called for a boycott, while extremists have threatened violence against those who take part. Nasreddin's reluctance stems from a suspicion that the U.S. will rig the vote.

"Whoever is elected will immediately sign over Iraqi sovereignty to the U.S.," Nasreddin says, "and keep American troops in Iraq forever." He is so concerned about his fate under a new government that he asks not to be identified by his real name.

Such is the divide in Iraq on the eve of its ready-or-not plunge into democracy: heady optimism on one street, jittery paranoia down another. In a country roiled by insurgency and sectarian tensions, occupied by a foreign army and populated by citizens largely unfamiliar with the democratic process, this is a time of profound uncertainty. The U.S. and the interim Iraqi government are hopeful that at least half the country's 15 million eligible voters will take part in the election, but no one can predict with any certainty what the turnout will be, especially among the disaffected Sunni population, who make up about 20% of the electorate. "We have no idea," says Carlos Valenzuela, head of the U.N. team overseeing the elections. "It would be up to the Iraqi public to determine." For many, just getting to the polls will be a challenge. The government plans to close all roads in the three days leading up to the vote.

With insurgents promising to sow chaos on election day, the mere act of casting a ballot has become a life-threatening proposition. Even in the holy city of Najaf, in the heart of largely Shi'ite southern Iraq, there are palpable fears of election-related violence. "Every day I watch when a car pulls up in the street," says Abbas Hamid Abdul Rezea as U.S. Marines erect concrete barricades across the road from his home at a school that will serve as a polling station.

"Every day we are so scared."

For the Bush Administration, the election is producing anxieties of a different kind. The Administration has long touted the vote as a step toward handing over control to the Iraqis and paving the way for an eventual reduction of the U.S. troop presence. The establishment of a popularly elected government, in the U.S. view, would help erode support for the insurgency. But it's highly likely that the vote will be compromised by violence and plagued by Sunni underparticipation, and that means the legitimacy of the new government will be suspect from the start. And while some members of the insurgency—whose estimated strength could be higher than 20,000—may be coaxed to come in from the cold, there's little chance that jihadist guerrillas will abandon their goal of fomenting civil war. As if to underscore the point, a group loyal to Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the most-wanted insurgent in Iraq, released an Internet audio message last week in which al-Zarqawi purportedly vows to wage holy war against the U.S. and its allies in Iraq for years.

Even as it confronts an enemy determined to keep fighting past Jan. 30, the Administration is facing the most serious erosion yet of public support at home. A range of polls show almost half of Americans support a drawdown of U.S. forces after the Iraqi election.

And despite the increasing potency of the insurgents and the inadequacy of U.S.-trained Iraqi forces to deal with them, only 4% of Americans believe that more U.S. troops should be sent to Iraq, according to a Los Angeles Times poll. For now, however, there's no timetable for reducing their ranks. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told TIME that "it's foolish to predict numbers and how much [the U.S. troop presence] will go down. It depends on how fast Iraqi security forces come along." Members of congressional armed-services committees are being warned privately by senior uniformed officers to expect at least 100,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq not only through this year but perhaps even through 2006.

Democratic Congressman Martin Meehan, who recently returned from Iraq, says, "There's no evidence I've seen in any briefings to suggest that violence will go down. It absolutely won't go down."

Given that sobering assessment and vows by the insurgents to step up their onslaught, will next week's elections matter? For Iraqis and Americans alike, much depends on whether the new government can prove that it has real authority, bring disenfranchised Sunnis into the political process and quickly establish itself as a credible body willing to work for national reconciliation. Considering the performance of the current government, headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, chances that the new leadership can impose order aren't great. If it fails, the country could slide into civil war. And yet, unlike the U.S.-appointed Allawi regime, which answers to Washington, an elected government will be able to control its own destiny. As Iraqis take over, the country may well become more conservative, less secular and perhaps more hospitable to Iran. That may come as a rude jolt of reality to those who still believe Iraq could become a beachhead of liberal democracy in the Middle East. But for Americans who are merely looking for a way out of Iraq, next week's election could well be the start of the withdrawal process.

Holding the vote, of course, will be challenge enough amid the chaos. But that's only the start. There is every indication that Sunday's vote will lead to a fractured, and highly fractious, Transitional National Assembly, in which no single party will command a clear majority. The new government's ability to deal with both the insurgents and the U.S. will be circumscribed by multiparty politics—a whole new notion for Iraq. It will be, as democracies usually are, noisy, messy and unpredictable.

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 Sunni—possibly 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.

So, under what kinds of conditions would they participate? Across the ethnic and political spectrum, Iraqi leaders say the best way for the new government to garner support would be to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. It might even help convince rejectionists—nationalistic insurgents as well as disaffected Sunnis like contractor Nasreddin—that the new government is not a puppet of the U.S. Spokesmen for several militant groups have told TIME that a scheduled exit of U.S. troops is an essential condition for any negotiations with the new government.

It isn't just the insurgents who would like to see the U.S. go. "The best way to please the masses, to gain legitimacy and credibility," says al-Dulame, "is to slap down the Americans in a very public way."

Many of the leaders on the Shi'ite slate say a summary eviction of the U.S. would not serve the new government's interests, since Iraqi security forces are in no position to pick up the slack. "When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections," says al-Mahdi. Still, the Shi'ite leadership remains adamant that it will be Baghdad's call to make. Last fall Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leading candidate on the Shi'ite slate, told TIME that the U.S. would leave when it was asked.

"The decision will be an Iraqi one, not an American one," he said. "And we want this foreign army out of our country immediately. We cannot tolerate this presence on our soil." At this point, many Americans seem willing to call al-Hakim's bluff.

But the Pentagon believes a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would condemn Iraq to a bloodbath wrought by Sunni insurgents against a weak central government that might then be tempted to seek help from Iran.

That said, the U.S. is well aware that the Iraqis will probably demand that the Americans start making plans to leave. In November the CIA's departing station chief in Baghdad sent a cable to Washington predicting that the new government would insist on a schedule for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. A State Department official tells TIME, "We always expected to face a request from the Iraqi government to have a specific timetable."

The U.S.'s position is that a timetable for troop withdrawal is out of the question. That, at any rate, is what top U.S. officials told an influential Sunni clerical group in early January after the imams said they would consider calling off their boycott of the vote in return for a pullout schedule. But the Pentagon is accelerating plans to embed U.S. military advisers with Iraqi security forces in hopes of improving their combat capabilities so that they can take over for U.S. troops. "The most important goal is to get the Iraqis into the fight, not to get our numbers down," says a senior Pentagon official.

"I hope no one has to continue dying for this war, but it is much better that Iraqis die for their country than Americans."

Among some Administration officials, an emerging view is that a deadline set by the new government may galvanize the project to train Iraqis. So far, only about 14,000 members of Iraq's army, special-operations and urban-warfare forces have been trained. The Pentagon says it needs more than 32,000. "A timetable may be our best ally," says a State Department official. "It may actually help us get the job done right and get it done fast." And neighboring countries might be more willing to help an independent Iraq with measures like the training of security forces and reconstruction. "There may be a lot of appeal for countries to get on board with something like this because they'd be making commitments not to us but to Iraq," says the official, adding that any call for withdrawal "has to be realistic—not just pulling out."

It says something about the collapse of American illusions in Iraq that a deal along those lines with an elected government might be the closest the U.S. can get to declaring victory and heading home. For Iraqis like Karim al-Saadi, the government that is born on Jan. 30 will be judged by how it succeeds "with important things." He defines them as "security, jobs ... and getting the Americans out of our country." If nothing else, those are goals for the new government that all Iraqis can agree on.

• BOBBY GHOSH/BAGHDAD