The Fourth Election

[Rudey]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/01/op...safire.html?hp

December 1, 2004
The New York Times
The Fourth Election
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON — "Welcome to the world's interrelated four-month, four-nation election cycle" was the challenge posted here in October.

So far, voters who support implanting freedom in the Middle East have won three in a row, electing President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the American ally John Howard in Australia, and George Bush here.

Now pessimists are trying desperately to call off the fourth election - the one scheduled for late January in Iraq to elect a 275-member national assembly that will write a constitution - lest they lose that vote, too.

For one awful moment last week, it seemed the foot-draggers might succeed. The old Sunni Arab politician Adnan Pachachi, who had been the U.N.'s choice for interim leader last year but was roundly rejected by Iraqis, convened a cabal of Sunni groups worried about a Shiite majority. They sought to appease violence by urging a six-month delay; that would give Sunni insurgents time to regroup after their Falluja defeat and then escalate warfare to push elections back forever.

This small gathering's consensus was reported as a major impetus to delay the vote. Even more alarming was the report that "the two main Kurdish parties supported the delay request."

If true, that would be a stunner. Could it be that the courageous Kurds, with 20 percent of the population - and having been protected from Saddam's genocide for the past decade by American and British air power - were about to double-cross us and side with the Sunni Baathists who had persecuted them?

On the phone, I put it to the top Kurd serving in the interim Iraqi government, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih: Were the Kurds chickening out?

"This whole story was an exercise in political spin," he replied. As he had just told Sir David Frost on BBC, Iraq is not the calamity we see on television. "I was supposed to be a Kurdish representative to that meeting, but it wasn't possible," Dr. Salih informed me. "A junior representative took part. No decision was made, and we did not endorse the delaying of the election."

No waffling? "We have demonstrated our resolve in Falluja," Salih said. "Holding the election will be tough, but delaying it would be tougher. We will do everything in our power to honor our commitment to free elections."

Pachachi, the chief spinner of delay, means trouble. At the Ambrosetti conference in Italy a year ago, I saw him with Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, getting instructions from Sunni Central. Pachachi has long been in the pocket of the Saudi royals, and a picture of him kissing the hand of the United Arab Emirates ruler, Sheik Zayed, disgusted many Iraqis, who blocked the U.N.'s choice. Instead, Iraqi leaders chose Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite; now Pachachi's pan-Arab crowd is out to avert elections and bring back Sunni minority rule.

My bona fides with the Kurdish people go back a generation, to friendship with their nationalist patriot, Mustafa Barzani. Kurds were the open source of a 2001 column reporting the presence of an affiliate of Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, in northern Iraq, where terrorists tried to kill Dr. Salih.

Hungry Kurds first told me of Saddam's oil-for-food scam, and still remember Christer Elfverson, the Swede who spent four years as the U.N. deputy to Benon Sevan - a bureaucrat who saw no evil in the denial of $4 billion worth of food and medicine owed the Kurds.

Today their pesh merga is the readiest and fiercest Iraqi fighting force. In Iraqi uniform, these mountain warriors are helping to pacify Mosul; they want to avoid Kurd-Arab clashes, but a million Kurds live in Baghdad and their trained compatriots will defend them from terrorists.

It's simplistic to prognosticate the coming election as 60 percent Shiite, 15 percent Sunni, 20 percent Kurd, 5 percent other. Only half the Shiites and Sunnis are fervent Islamists, while most of the Kurds are secular Sunnis. The result is an Oliver Hardy demographic: "a fine mess," susceptible to democratic surprises by charismatic local candidates.

The most important element in the two months leading up to this fourth election is a sense of inexorability. The U.N. may run, the Pachachi reactionaries may drag a foot, the terrorists may intimidate - but the vote must go on. Democracy delayed is democracy denied.

-Rudey