Iraq Vote May Be More Explosive Than Bombings

(March 5) -- The deadly attacks that marred early voting in Iraq may have offered the most graphic image of Iraqi politics for 2010, but they won't be the deciding factor.

How the country's factions act on the election results will have far greater consequences -- for Iraq's future and the Obama administration's ambitious schedule to pull out tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops by September.

Some 800,000 Iraqis were eligible to vote Thursday, three days before millions more are scheduled to participate in the main day of voting for a new parliament. The new lawmakers eventually will create the government that will run Iraq after the American withdrawal. Security forces who will guard polling places on Sunday were allowed to vote early, as were hospital workers and patients and some Iraqis in prison.

Muhannad Fala'ah, Getty Images

An Iraqi solider stands guard as other soldiers line up Thursday to cast early ballots in Iraq's parliamentary elections. General voting begins Sunday.

Three polling stations came under attack Thursday, with the deadliest incident a suicide bombing that killed 27 soldiers who had just voted in Baghdad, according to The New York Times.

But those assaults are a far cry from the insurgent violence that gripped Iraq for five years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, or even the spikes in militant attacks that stand out amid the simmering violence of the past year. Any attacks carried out on Sunday are unlikely to cause disruption beyond the individual voting sites they target.

"Iraq has been through so many of those that it's not the main worry," said Michael O'Hanlon, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution. "It's far less decisive than what we'll see in the weeks after the election and how [the politicians] form new coalitions."

The election itself, a milestone in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, may feel anticlimactic considering how long it might take to form a new government. The votes won't be confirmed and ratified for two weeks, and if no party wins a majority, as expected, the horse trading to create a governing coalition and pick a new prime minister could take months.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wasn't sworn in until May 2006, five months after Iraq's last parliamentary election. The coming post-election calculations could be even more complicated.

Iraq's large minority of Sunni Muslims largely boycotted earlier votes. Though some Sunni candidates were barred from running this time, they make up formidable parts of two secular political alliances that are taking on al-Maliki's Shiite Muslim-dominated State of Law coalition. Al-Maliki is also opposed by the Shiite-controlled Iraqi National Alliance, which includes former political allies and remnants of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political movement.

Two Kurdish groups are expected to maintain strong bargaining positions in the next parliament as well.

In addition to Shiite-Sunni bids for power and ministries in the next government, and Arab-Kurdish clashes over still-unsettled territorial claims in the north, the government negotiators will have to wrestle with how to share Iraq's oil wealth and many other issues that al-Maliki hasn't been able to settle.

Iran's role could complicate matters as Tehran tries to maintain some influence, though it isn't clear which Shiite politicians or parties would get backing from Iran or whether such support at this point in Iraq's evolution might trigger a backlash among Iraqis.

And just as uncertain is how al-Maliki will react if, as many observers expect, voters don't give him enough support to keep him in the prime minister's office.

"This is not like a typical election," said Brett McGurk, a former National Security Council official who dealt with Iraq in the George W. Bush administration and the early days of the Obama administration. "They're shaping the table for what will be protracted negotiations. Even a party that might not fare as well as it wishes could have a substantial stake in the next government."

Moreover, McGurk noted, the parties with fewer votes are likely to cry fraud. Or as U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill put it last month, "The true test will not be in the reaction of winners, but how losers accept the results."

"It's going to be a really bumpy road, no question," McGurk said. "Those that don't get what they want in negotiations are going to come out and say we're on the brink of insurrection."

Which comes back to the issue of violence, and whether the security situation will allow the U.S. to reduce its troop level from the current 96,000 to President Barack Obama's goal of 50,000 by Sept. 1.

The current level will be maintained in the weeks after the vote "to provide for a peaceful transfer of power," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Wednesday.

If insurgents succeed in killing dozens of Iraqis through election violence, or even hundreds, that's more a humanitarian problem, O'Hanlon said. Only if the violence feeds into a sense of political disenfranchisement and reignites a cycle of major attacks would it probably require a significant alteration of Obama's plans.

And if that happens?

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs noted Thursday that "a host of contingency plans [are] prepared for any number of different scenarios."