Matthew B. Stannard and Edward Epstein
San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, January 29, 2005
To many Americans and Iraqis, tomorrow's elections in Iraq are being seen as a major step in the country's march toward full-fledged democracy. On Wednesday, President Bush called it "a grand moment in Iraqi history."
But even if the elections succeed amid continuing violence, the nationwide vote is just the beginning of a tough, uncertain political process that will take another year and possibly much longer to complete, as Bush and other senior administration officials have acknowledged.
"People have to look at these elections as part of the overall transition process," said Washington lawyer Brett McGurk, who, as a legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, helped draft the interim constitution now in effect. "If anybody sees these elections as a panacea or the endgame, then they are not seeing the whole picture."
The picture begins with Iraqis voting tomorrow for a National Assembly, and for local councils in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Separately, Kurds in the north are voting for candidates to the Kurdistan National Council, which has governed the semi-autonomous northernmost regions of Iraq for more than a decade.
The new assembly will assume the day-to-day governing powers currently held by the U.S.-appointed interim government -- including oversight of reconstruction and the Iraqi military -- along with several new ones, including the ability to negotiate international treaties, propose and ratify laws, and enter so-called status of forces agreements that could, for example, determine who has jurisdiction for U.S. troops accused of committing crimes on Iraqi soil.
The assembly will elect a three-member Presidency Council that, in turn, names a prime minister, chooses Cabinet ministers and appoints Federal Supreme Court judges -- all positions with real power, especially the prime minister.
"They'll be running the government on a day-to-day basis," said Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Those will be key interim positions."
Meanwhile, the assembly will have its hands full with perhaps the most critical, and potentially divisive, task of all: writing a new, permanent constitution for Iraq.
"It's shaping the rules for the future. Everything is at stake in those rules," including whether Iraq will be secular or religious, the status of women and the nation's basic political geography, said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. "It's all up for grabs."
McGurk predicts that the drafting will involve "a lot of horse trading, not everybody getting what they want."
Apart from the vexing issues of the role of women and the status of Islam, the constitution will have to decide between a strong federal government with weak local control -- an option probably preferred by lawmakers representing the majority Shiite population -- to a loose confederation of states, an option attractive to the Kurds in the north, who have enjoyed semi-independence for more than a decade. Or any arrangement in between.
The assembly is to prepare a draft of the permanent constitution by Aug. 15 and hold a national referendum on it by Oct. 15 -- a time frame many experts say is dangerously short -- followed by new national elections in December. That deadline can be extended -- once -- by no more than six months if a majority of the National Assembly so requests by Aug. 1.
If the constitution is rejected by the voters -- or by two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces, a mechanism designed mainly to protect Kurdish autonomy over Shiite objections -- the assembly will be dissolved and a new one formed by Dec. 31, with a mandate to write a new constitution within a year.
After that, there are no further extensions, and the future slips into undetermined territory.
"It could be a legal and constitutional conundrum," Brown said.
The key to holding Iraq together, experts say, is for its different religious, ethnic and geographical groups to compromise, said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"The backroom maneuvering will take three or four weeks after the election before we know how good or bad the situation will be" before the assembly gets organized, he said.
McGurk said the Shiite politicians expected to dominate Iraq's election are not foolish enough to allow the process to self-destruct.
"The Shia political class in Iraq is quite responsible, and I think you will see a lot of outreach to Arab Sunni groups," he said. "The idea that the National Assembly is going to lock the doors, draft the constitution and that's it isn't true."
Even if, as expected, the Arab Sunni turnout is low tomorrow, which some fear could call into question the election's legitimacy, Sunni politicians who have said they will boycott the election have also said in the past few days that they want to participate in the constitutional process.
And McGurk and other experts said the checks and balances built into the process will protect the rights of the minorities.
As for the U.S. military presence, while there is widespread expectation that troop withdrawal negotiations will commence with a new Iraqi government, most of the political leaders expected to do well in the election have said they expect a U.S. force to remain for some time. A senior U.S. Army operations officer said Monday that 120,000 will stay through 2006.
Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives of Cambridge, Mass., said the United States will remain a vital player as the political process unfolds.
"The most powerful political institution in Iraq -- indeed, the only truly powerful one -- is the U.S. Mission. Its resources, organizational capacity and armed might far surpass those at the disposal of the Iraqi government," he wrote in a recently published paper.
But other experts point out that a sovereign Iraqi government is not bound by either U.S. policy or the U.N. resolution that states the mandate for a multinational force on Iraqi territory shall expire Dec. 31.
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Citation:
Matthew B. Stannard and Edward Epstein, "Election, even if a success, is just first difficult step", San Francisco Chronicle, 29 January 2005.