Only the most stubborn wouldn’t be convinced by Adnan Pachachi’s argument in favor of delaying the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq, now 27 days away. He is a Sunni politician, a pre-Saddam era foreign minister, and a leading candidate for the hand-picked job that Prime Minister Allawi has now. He is a conservative, pro-Gulf monarchy businessman, with ties to the CIA.
In an op-ed in the Post , on Sunday, he wrote:
[The] situation has deteriorated significantly. None of us could have imagined a year ago that parents would refuse to send their children to school because of rampant kidnapping in the capital, Baghdad. Baghdadis have told me that they have no intention of leaving their homes on Election Day, because they fear the terrorists. The same can be said of areas such as Fallujah, Samarra and Mosul, where a recent attack on a U.S. Army base shows how easy it would be to disrupt elections, as do the recent bombings in Karbala. Nothing remotely like electioneering takes place in Iraq, even in relatively peaceful areas in the south and north. For candidates to announce mass rallies would be to issue an open invitation for terrorists to attack. Not many electoral messages beamed on radio and television will be seen or heard because of the nationwide electricity crisis.
Some argue that delaying elections would give a victory to the terrorists, and I admit there is merit in this argument. But there is more than one way for the terrorists to win in Iraq in January. Another would be for them to cause large numbers of Iraqis to stay away from the polls, not in protest but out of fear for their lives. That would result in elections whose legitimacy would be questioned. Whoever was perceived as having won such a flawed election would claim a mandate, while others would claim they had been disenfranchised. Very few scenarios take us deeper into chaos and civil unrest than this very likely outcome. I would argue that the prospect of these disastrous events unfolding is far worse than any short-lived claim of victory the terrorists might make.
No electioneering. No electricity, so no news and no broadcast ads. The only thing for sure in the election is that the lock-step Shiite fanatics who follow Ayatollah Sistani’s beck and call will win massively. Virtually all of the Sunni parties are boycotting or simply ignoring the elections, since they know their constituency—in Baghdad, Mosul, Samarra and elsewhere either will boycott the election or will not dare come out to vote.
Pachachi’s idea, strongly rejected by the Bush administration, would give the powers-that-be in Iraq a slim chance to negotiate a participatory arrangement for power-sharing with the pro-Baathists, the Sunnis, the Arab nationalists and other left-center forces, while excluding the Islamist Zarqawi-style terrorists.
It’s too much to expect Bush to see the light on this one, though the chorus of voices suggesting that the elections be postponed is growing.
Today’s Wall Street Journal attacks Pachachi, trundling out the pro-Shiite arguments that have become pro forma for neocons.
There are still some in the U.S. government, especially at State and the CIA, who want to carve out some preferred status for Sunnis … They fear a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. But such an outcome was foreordained when we entered Iraq professing to support democracy, and we have no choice but to let the process play out.
Of course, it’s not true that the United States has no choice but to let Sistani and Co. take over Iraq. By the way, on that front, Ahmad Chalabi is taking a yet higher profile. He’s just returned from Iran, his home away from home, where he met with none other than Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, and then returned to Baghdad as the Shiite coalition’s semi-official ambassador to Iran. So, the neocons’ favorite Iraqi (Chalabi) is powwowing with the neocons’ favorite Iranian (Rafsanjani). It was the latter, of course, who helped Michael Ledeen, the Mossad, and Ollie North get Bill Casey’s Iran-contra initiative rolling in the 1980s. Plus ca change . Rafsanjani is a candidate for president of Iran. It’s not inconceivable that by the end of 2005 Chalabi and Rafsanjani could end up running the two neighboring countries.
