Iraq's Messy Democracy

Baqubah, the capital of Iraq's Diyala province, is a largely colorless place except for the winter orange harvest and the hundreds of campaign posters that line its streets. But at least the sectarian battles between Sunnis and Shi'ites that once raged through the city are now confined mostly to the ballot box as Baqubah, along with the rest of Iraq, prepares for national parliamentary elections on March 7. Inside the fortified government headquarters, Diyala's governor, Abdul-Nasser al-Mahdawi, is relatively optimistic that the elections — the fifth poll since the U.S. brought democracy to Iraq — will go smoothly. "The country is getting better at elections," he tells TIME. "In the first, the fraud was about 40%. In the second, let's say 20%." Still, al-Mahdawi, who belongs to a Sunni party that opposes Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led governing coalition, worries about an élite counterterrorism unit run by al-Maliki's office, which, he says, is responsible for the arrests of scores of opposition politicians and government critics in Diyala. Two months ago, members of the unit took the deputy governor, Mohammad Hussein al-Jabouri. "Of course it's totally political," says one of the governor's aides. "If he is really a terrorist, why didn't they arrest him before he was elected?" (See pictures of Iraqis preparing to vote.)

Democracy is messy everywhere. In Iraq, it is both messy and dangerous. The country has now had more practice at choosing its own leaders in relatively open elections than perhaps any Middle Eastern nation besides Israel and Lebanon. In 2003, many U.S. architects of the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein hoped the events would be followed by a democratic ripple effect throughout the region. That has not yet happened. The politicians who came to power after the country's first parliamentary election five years ago have been unable to resolve core issues — from deciding how to share oil revenue to how to balance power among the country's regions and the central government and how to weld fractious religious and ethnic groups into a unified nation. (See pictures of President Bush in the Middle East.)

But now Iraq has another chance. The surge of American military forces in 2007 bought time for Iraq's leaders to work out their problems. The U.S. is betting that they can. The Status of Forces Agreement worked out between the Bush Administration and the Iraqi government holds that the U.S. must withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by the end of August and the remaining 50,000 support troops by the end of 2011. The Obama Administration has stuck to the timetable. With one eye on a developing political maturity in Iraq, Vice President Joe Biden has predicted that Iraq could be one of the Administration's "great achievements." He said recently, "You're going to see a stable government in Iraq."

There is indeed much for Iraqis to be proud of in their fledgling democracy. Since a new law opened elections to anyone who wants to hold office — rather than letting only the political parties stuff the lists of candidates — anyone and everyone seems to be running for parliament. There are about 6,000 candidates for 325 seats, and some 86 parties taking part in the election. The sectarian and ethnic political parties whose leaders tore the nation apart are still the country's most powerful, but they have joined in loose multiethnic and multisectarian coalitions. "Obviously there are still going to be candidates who just parrot what their leader says, but that's not going to be as effective this time," says an official with a U.S.-funded NGO that works on democracy training. Iraq's political class, she says, is learning that "they have to let the public define the issues, rather than defining the issues for them." (See pictures of Iraq's revival.)

That's accurate. The parties are running their campaigns in large part on substantive issues: most important, whether power in Iraq should be more centralized in the hands of the government in Baghdad or dispersed to its provinces and regions. The centralizers include al-Maliki's Shi'ite-dominated State of Law coalition, which is running on its record of providing security and disarming Iraq's militias. The more Sunni and secular Iraqi National Movement, led by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, is likewise in favor of a strong central government. The push for decentralization is represented by the ruling parties of the Kurdistan Regional Government and an alliance of Shi'ite parties — led by Ammar al-Hakim and chastened warlord Muqtada al-Sadr, among others — that critics claim is bent on creating a semiautonomous Shi'ite enclave in oil-rich southern Iraq.

See pictures of President Obama in Iraq.

See a TIME photographer's Iraq diary.