IT HAS been a black week in Iraq: seven kidnappings, one bomb which killed 47, three decapitations, and a warning by US forces that they may not be able to protect the perimeter of the fortified Green Zone.
How serious are things? Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General, told the BBC that in his view: “You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now”. That is not the only gloomy assessment. President Bush has received a bleak new national intelligence estimate on Iraq, according to the New York Times yesterday. Its most optimistic projection was a country with a “tenuous” grip on stability; the worst was civil war.
Mr Annan’s comments, in which he also questioned the legality of the war, kicked off a fierce debate within the US and internationally, as politicians and leaders rushed to comment on the latest bloodshed in Iraq.
Yet there is a danger in taking a particularly bloody week as the full measure of Iraq’s problems. Mr Annan is right to identify the elections due in January as the best test of whether Iraq can come to any good. He may, however, have been too unremittingly bleak in his view of Iraq’s ability to get there, given the huge public desire that those elections should take place.
Yesterday the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, seized on the pessimistic Intelligence Estimate as one of the few sharp weapons available to him in fighting Mr Bush. The 50-page document, which sets out three scenarios for Iraq’s future through to the end of 2005, shows “a significant amount of pessimism”, according to a government official quoted by the New York Times.
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The assessment, delivered to the President in July, was the first compiled on Iraq by the intelligence agencies since October 2002, reports say. The most optimistic scenario is hardly cheery, predicting that Iraq’s politics, economy and security would remain shaky — but it does at least use the word “stability”.
Mr Kerry also yesterday homed in on the growing questions about the elections. “I think it is very difficult to see today how you’re going to distribute ballots in places like Fallujah, and Ramadi and Najaf, without having established the security,” he said. But in fact, no one is proposing to distribute ballots in Fallujah. In the past couple of weeks, there has been a subtle but clear shift in the messages from US officials and from members of Iyad Allawi’s government — indeed, from the Interim Prime Minister himself.
The new line is that polls will take place even if they cannot cover the whole country. The Kurdish north, one of the most stable parts of the country, will certainly hold polls, with a fair degree of regularity. The same can be expected of the Shia south, as elections are in the interest of Shias, the ethnic majority.
The problem is the middle. The interim government may attempt to set up secure polling points outside Fallujah and other flashpoints. But, if necessary, it will leave them out of the elections, with a view to adding them in later once security was under control.
“If 300,000 people cannot vote because terrorists decide so, and this is imposing a very big if — then frankly 300,000 people ... is not going to alter 25 million people voting,” Dr Allawi told The Times this week. The question is whether enough people will turn out to vote so that the interim government can claim that there has been a fair election.
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The factor which must weigh in favour of the elections is the enormous popular support for the notion of voting. Dr Allawi and US officials do not know how big this support is, or how many will be deterred by the fear of violence. But they are sure enough of this support to have shied away from any talk of postponing the date. Better to have an imperfect election than a delayed one; that is their clear view.
In this, they appear to have the backing of the embryonic political parties. Given that the largest, a Shia party, has only 4per cent support, it is obvious that the parties will have to form alliances in order to fight the elections. There are signs that they have already begun to do this.
This will not be the last black week, or the last one that triggers a new chorus of pessimism. All the same, there is some momentum behind the plans for January elections. What matters most is that Iraq makes it there.