Word View: The prospect of direct elections in Iraq, which could be won by a Shia party representing 60 per cent of its inhabitants, came closer this week after a meeting between US, British and Iraqi representatives with the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in New York, writes Paul Gillespie.
It was quite a turn for the coalition representatives to approach the UN directly in this way after the disdain with which it was treated by the Bush administration during and after the war.
It is driven by the increasing difficulty in arranging a transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis by the end of June, a timetable laid down by President Bush to ensure US troops would be withdrawing from Iraq by the presidential elections in November. The UN will now have to decide whether to send a political team to Iraq and then what conditions should apply if it is to assume overall control there. A new Security Council mandate would allow more troops to be deployed, from a greater number of states than the 34 already involved in the US-led coalition.
The plan prepared by the US occupation authorities provides for indirect caucus elections throughout Iraq's 18 provinces for a representative assembly this summer. It would authorise a government to take over from the existing governing authority, draft a constitution, and arrange elections for next year.
The plan has come up against a flat refusal by the Shia religious leader, Ayatollah al-Husseini al-Sistani, to accept such an approach, backed up this week by tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets. He demands direct elections before the handover of power. He will only depart from this position if the UN concludes it would not be administratively practicable to hold elections. Such a judgment should not be left to the occupation authorities, whom he suspects of wanting to select tame proxies to replace them. This would once again disadvantage the majority Shia community, which was excluded from power by successive colonial and Iraqi regimes.
The trouble for the US with early elections is not only that administrative and political preparations for them may not be complete, but that the wrong people could win. In April last year Donald Rumsfeld said Iraq should not become a theocracy, but a tolerant secular country in which all religions and ethnic groups enjoy the same rights. Secular Iraqis, including those who prospered under Saddam Hussein and Baathist remnants, are worried about the Shia revival. They fear an evolution in Iraq similar to what happened in Iran after the fall of the monarchy in 1979.
It would be a great irony if a war fought against Saddam Hussein because he was supposedly helping Islamic terrorist movements such as al-Qaeda ended up empowering the takeover of Iraq by an Islamist movement opposed to the US. As the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, puts it in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, it would be "as if, in a contemporary display of the 'cunning of reason', some invisible hand of destiny repeatedly ensures that the US intervention only makes more likely the outcomes the United States sought most to avoid".
Robert McNamara, architect of the US war in Vietnam, was eventually rattled on television not by a moral critique of the war but by an accusation that it was being run inefficiently. In the same way Zizek analyses the inconsistent aims of US policy in Iraq, comparing it to the weird logic of dreams as examined by Freud. The first wave of justifications for the war concentrated on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, which threatened the region and the world. So far none have been found. Then Saddam was associated with al-Qaeda's involvement in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington - for which Bush has had to admit there is no evidence. Then it was argued that Saddam was a threat to the region and a menace to his own people, which justifies toppling him. But then what of Iran, Syria and North Korea?
It was always difficult during the war and after it to understand the precise justifications for fighting it. More plausible ones could not be explicitly articulated. They included a sincere belief that it is the destiny of the US to bring democracy and prosperity to other nations; the imperative to assert US global hegemony brutally and unconditionally after the 9/11 attacks in an exemplary display of pre-emptive force; and the need to control Iraqi oil reserves.
As President Bush put it in London last November, the US will pursue a "forward strategy of freedom" in the Middle East, including doubling the National Endowment for Democracy's budget in order to develop "free elections, free markets, free press and free labour unions in the Middle East". Timothy Garton Ash, writing in Thursday's Guardian, points out correctly that "this is dynamite", in the light of how similar funds were used in eastern Europe and the Balkans.
But Zizek argues that the three goals of spreading democracy, asserting hegemony and securing oil supplies are incompatible. If Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other sheikhdoms are to continue supplying oil to the US they must remain undemocratic, since the alternative would probably be Islamic nationalist regimes hostile to US hegemony. The US may act globally, but it thinks locally, putting domestic interests before imperial ones.
Another alternative in Iraq would be a break-up of the country into three parts after a premature US departure, possibly through a bloody war of secession between the Kurdish-dominated north, the Shia heartland and the Sunni south. Turkey's military is deeply concerned about this - and not much less so about the prospect of a federal Iraq in which the Kurdish north would have substantial autonomy.
British officials are quoted in the Guardian as saying break-up is certainly a risk, just as direct elections would be. The US authorities hope Ayatollah Sistani will be willing to postpone his demand for elections under UN prompting. Others point out that he shows no signs of wanting an Iranian-style clericalist regime, but is rather concerned to ensure his people are not marginalised once again. Either way an emerging Iraqi democracy needs time, resources and international legitimacy to organise itself.