NYT: Politics of Exclusion in Iraq

[Barrett808]

Last week's national political conference in Baghdad was all but eclipsed by the armed standoff outside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf. But the Baghdad politicking was just as important for the future prospects of a unified Iraq, and the outcome was mostly discouraging.

Although it brought together what was probably the most diverse collection of Iraqis ever to sit in a single hall and produced some glimmers of democratic debate, the conference largely failed to achieve the crucial purpose assigned to it in the planning for a transition to a workable democracy. It was supposed to provide a broader base for governance and constitutional compromise than Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's narrow, exile-dominated cabinet. That did not really happen. Instead, the gathering was controlled from beginning to end by a familiar cast of characters, drawn from the same narrow sources as the first American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. As a result, the Allawi government largely squandered its best single opportunity to draw disaffected Iraqis into peaceful politics in advance of next year's elections.

The conference's main task was to choose a 100-person interim assembly with the power to oversee the cabinet, veto legislation and approve the budget. The United Nations and foreign diplomats had been concerned that the interim government was not doing enough to draw in political independents and regional leaders. Even more ominously, the Allawi government had not sufficiently reached out to include radical Sunni nationalists and Shiite religious factions now torn between entering the political process and persisting in armed resistance. Dealing with these Sunni and Shiite radicals is admittedly difficult, and some of them probably want no part of a representative government. But leaving large numbers of them outside the tent makes more of the kind of revolts seen in Falluja, Najaf and the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad almost inevitable.

In the end, many who should have attended were not present and the independents who did show up were deprived of real power in choosing the assembly members. Before the conferees even assembled, 19 of the 100 assembly seats had been reserved for those members of the old governing council who had not made it into the new cabinet. Then, last Wednesday, parties associated with that discredited council pushed through a single slate allocating the remaining 81 seats.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/opinion/22sun1.html