By Patricia H. Kushlis
Finally. The first real numbers from the January 30 Iraqi national elections have begun to trickle in. The New York Times published those earliest returns on February 3, results that came from about 521 of Iraq’s 5,216 polling stations. According to a later PBS Newshour report, the polls in question were located in six heavily Shiite provinces.
The results so far? Extremely heavy support for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite religious coalition close to Iraq's highest ranking Shiia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani: 75% for Sistani’s people versus 19% for Ayad Alawi and the Shiite secularists. Or: 94% total for Shiite parties. I have yet to see any Kurdish provincial results – and the Sunni Arabs, well, few expected their numbers to amount to much even if they hadn’t been warned to stay home.
But, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I would wonder why this initial count was only released today. Less than 24 hours after the President’s State of the Union Address.
Personally, I prefer that election officials take their time and get the count right so slow returns are not in themselves bad. This includes in the USA. Maybe we’d be far better off with more, slower, paper ballot counts particularly in hotly contested states and fewer Diebold instant results machines. At least the Iraqi voters were spared this latter questionable electoral practice. Maybe neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld had close ties to the Diebold Board?
What troubles me about the Iraq elections, though, is the instant hype based on early unsubstantiated claims of success, e.g. around a 60% turnout, that was immediately trumpeted by the Bush Administration and its neocon acolytes – or is it the other way around – as the polls were closing. This unsubstantiated success, of course, wound up referenced in the President’s State of the Union Address before even the first hard numbers were announced.
I’m still not sure what the mythical 60% percentage was based on. Maybe is was only the imaginative creation of an over-zealous election official who licked his forefinger and held it up to see which way the wind was blowing and responded as a way to satisfy - and ward off - the instant news demands of a hovering western media.
Regardless, this is yet another myth likely to become a reality in the recesses of too many American minds even though John Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, soon thereafter cautioned against relying on the validity of such unsubstantiated early reports.
I like elections. I like following electoral results. I like explaining the variations in electoral systems in a variety of countries, and I liked managing reporters who reported US national election results in New Mexico. But I’m even more interested in an election’s implications.
So what exactly will these latest Iraqi election results mean?
Will they mean that the occupation will soon be over and our kids brought home? I don’t think so. Iraq is incredibly unstable, 26 or was it 27 more Iraqis and 2 American military were killed just today. The multiple insurgencies have not disappeared. They were just brought to parade-rest by a kind of nationwide shake-down and temporary national lock-up that allowed the voting to proceed in one of the mercifully quietest days in the country’s post-invasion history.
Will these elections mean the first day of the dawning of Iraqi democracy that will then spread through example to the rest of the Middle East like the spontaneous revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989? Don’t bet on it.
Besides, elections - in and of themselves - do not make democracy. They are just one of its components. After all, the Soviet Union regularly held elections – but that didn’t make it democratic. And I question whether elections held under any occupation force bedeviled by insurgents are worth much in the long run.
Look at the free and fair South Vietnamese elections September 4, 1967 - according to a NY Times report at the time - held under similar conditions. Just how long did their results last? The TET offensive - the beginning of the end - occurred in March 1968 – about six months later.
What the Iraqi elections will most likely mean is the legitimacy - under American tutelage - of a second theocratically-Shiite dominated government in the oil-rich Middle East.
This will be far from the secular state the neocons had in mind when they lied to Congress and the U.S. people to get support for an invasion and occupation which has already cost over $200 billion in less than two years, more than 1400 US lives, and far more Iraqi deaths.
Yet, just as Iraq is not Iran, Ali al-Sistani is not a clone of Iran's late Grand Ayatollah Komenei who saw theocracy as the way to govern what became the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Shiite Islam, I understand, Ayatollahs need not always agree. So a new Iraq need not necessarily follow Iran’s political path – and al-Sistani has thus far preferred to operate off political center stage. But he is certainly the “power behind the throne” - the most politically powerful Iraqi in Iraq.
At the least, the temptation will be great for vanquished- turned-victorious Shiites to turn the tables and settle some long awaited scores – despite early rhetoric to the contrary. Then there's still the unresolved Kurdish question in the North.
Only time will tell whether cooler heads will prevail in this Middle Eastern Mesopotamian mosaic and for how long. But the Bush Administration is right about one thing: don’t expect the shooting to stop and the troops to come home any time soon.
