Iraq Update: The Prospects for Peace, Reconstruction, and the January Elections

Transcript

KENNETH POLLACK: ... There were two areas that I wanted to focus on, and I wanted to focus on them because I think that they are getting a little bit lost in the heavy media coverage of our own election and in the media coverage of kind of the day to day affairs in Iraq. I think we are losing sight of some of the big picture.

Now, first is the election, and obviously the media has been focusing on the election, but my concerns about the election are effectively threefold. First, I am very concerned that the elections can't come off because of the current security environment. I just don't see how that is going to possibly happen. Even if we're able to stabilize a number of the areas, the fact of the matter is, as Donald Rumsfeld has suggested, we could have elections in three quarters of the country, maybe four fifths of the country. I don't know how you have elections on a proportional representation system in less than 100 percent of the country. I've never seen that happen before. I don't know what it would look like. Personally, I think it's impossible to do that. Proportion representation requires you to have the entirety of the country able to vote. Otherwise, you would badly skew the different party results. I think that the likelihood that we are going to be able to get ourselves into a situation where we're going to be able to have those kind of free and fair elections across the country is increasingly remote.

A second issue about the elections: I think that we are failing to recognize the potential problems of the proportional representation system for Iraq. That's another reason why I personally would like very much to see the elections postponed. Now I recognize there will be other bites at this apple, but the simple fact of the matter is each time we have had some kind of a change in the government, an expansion of the government, some participation, whatever it may be, we've simply reinforced the party system that's already in place. Now, this is a natural tendency. Parties like to keep themselves in power, and especially in Iraq where the parties that exist really don't have very broad bases of support. They're all looking to manipulate the current political system to allow them greater political control than they otherwise would if you simply threw things open in a completely fair and free election.

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