Can Iraq's Election Be Saved?

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Lieut. General Thomas Metz, the commander of U.S. ground forces, said last week that four of Iraq's 18 provinces remain too unsafe for many to vote. These insecure areas--which include portions of Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Saddam's hometown of Tikrit--are home to as much as 40% of Iraq's population. While the U.S. expects high participation among the country's Shi'ites and Kurds, it fears that Sunni participation could be as low as 10% to 15%. "The insurgents are going to try to intimidate Iraqis to prevent them from voting, and they will go to any lengths to do that," says a Defense Department official. "We may not have seen the end of what they'll do."

That's a chilling prospect. In a report released last week, the CIA's in-house think tank, the National Intelligence Council, warned that jihadists are transforming Iraq into another Afghanistan, a "training ground" for a "new class of terrorists who are professionalized and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself." Pentagon officials say there are fewer daily attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces than there were two months ago, but they are stunned by the lethality of recent insurgent attacks. A roadside bomb last Monday blew up a Bradley fighting vehicle, a heavily armored troop carrier designed to battle Soviet infantry during the cold war, killing two U.S. soldiers. Many roadside bombs are expertly packed with large Russian-made shells fused together to blow up simultaneously and penetrate thickly armored vehicles. "What a mess," says another Pentagon official. "The frustration level here is high. The insurgents aren't stupid. They have the training, the equipment, the munitions, and they can see how effective they've been."

After months spent hyping the election as a watershed--not just for Iraq but also for the entire Arab world--and a necessary step toward an eventual reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq, the Administration is now downplaying expectations, pointing out that voters will merely be selecting a transitional government on Jan. 30, which will in turn begin the process of writing a constitution. If all goes as planned, a permanent government will take power in 2006. "These elections will not be perfect," says a senior Administration official. "Allawi said to our Congress that these will not be the best elections Iraq ever has. And that's true." So why not postpone them? Administration officials say that a delay would hand the insurgency a political victory and risk infuriating the majority Shi'ites--in particular their chief religious authority, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani. The Shi'ites have "consistently expressed a desire for this process to just get a move on and for there to be fair representation," says a British official who has spent time in Iraq. And no one thinks security will quickly improve. "If we delay by two, three or six months," says the British official, "one month before election day we would be in exactly the same position we are now but with an extra 1,000 people dead and the violence more sophisticated."