Can Iraq Rule Itself?

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Holding the vote, of course, will be challenge enough amid the chaos. But that's only the start. There is every indication that Sunday's vote will lead to a fractured, and highly fractious, Transitional National Assembly, in which no single party will command a clear majority. The new government's ability to deal with both the insurgents and the U.S. will be circumscribed by multiparty politics--a whole new notion for Iraq. It will be, as democracies usually are, noisy, messy and unpredictable.

Just look at the likely winners. The largest political group running in the election, the United Iraqi Alliance (U.I.A.), is a grab bag of parties that have little in common apart from a desire for power and a deep-seated distrust of U.S. motives. Backed by Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the supreme religious leader of Iraq's Shi'ite majority, the U.I.A. includes the country's strongest Shi'ite parties, among them the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (S.C.I.R.I.) and the Dawa Party, which have close links to Iran. It also includes such wild cards as former Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi as well as representatives of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite leader whose militias were fighting pitched battles with U.S. troops less than a year ago.

In the absence of reliable nationwide opinion polls, predicting a victor in the Jan. 30 election is a fool's game. Even if the Shi'ite slate lives up to claims by its leaders that it has the backing of 60% of the country, it's hard to know who would emerge as the candidate for Prime Minister.

Speculation in the Iraqi media centers on three candidates, all considered religious moderates: the Dawa Party's Ibrahim al-Jaffari, S.C.I.R.I.'s Adil Abd al-Mahdi and Sistani prot??g?? Hussein Shahristani. Whoever gets the nod, Washington will find itself having to deal with a group that has no natural affinity with the U.S. "These are all people who have one reason or another to dislike America," says pollster Sadoun al-Dulame, executive director of the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies. "If George Bush has to do business with these people, well, good luck to him."