Hope in Iraq's elections

Sunday's national elections in Iraq, the most important marker to date in the nation's shift from tyranny to democracy, should be celebratory.

More than 6,000 candidates are campaigning for 325 parliamentary positions, and though U.S. troops are providing significant support, Iraqis themselves are in charge of security for the election.

Sunnis, who boycotted the 2005 elections, are participating this time around. And in a shift that suggests a resurgence in non-sectarian secular politics, many Sunnis support a party which has allied with Ayad Allawi, a Shiite and the main contender for power against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who wants to return to power under his party's "State of Law" coalition.

Perhaps most remarkably, the uncertain, strongly contested outcome suggests that voters themselves -- and not some invisible ruling hand -- will prove the legitimacy of an open, democratic vote.

But for all that, the country is in a military lock-down mode that suggests the threats that still plague Iraq. Polling stations are guarded by blast walls and heavily armed troops. In Baghdad and other major cities, streets and sometimes whole blocks are cordoned off from traffic to guard against bomb-laden vehicles. In some towns, streets have been filled with fliers promising death to those who take a chance on voting.

The foreboding is palpable, reports from Iraq suggest, especially so after a spate of terrorist and suicide bombings in Baghdad, Mosul, and Baquba since last Wednesday. Three bombings in Baghdad on Thursday hit voting precincts where, in two cases, early voting was taking place for soldiers and police who will be on guard in the general election Sunday. In one such attack, a truck carrying 27 soldiers who had just voted was decimated.

It's clear the sectarian and terrorist horrors that have haunted Iraq since the Shia-Sunni civil war of 2005-2007 have not yet been eliminated. In the darkest period of the sectarian violence, 3,000 corpses, often mutilated, were found on Baghdad streets each month, and the horrendous toll of al Qaida bombings that provoked that bloodbath seemed unstoppable.

Since campaigning began in August in the run-up to the Sunday's elections, bombings have again increased. And since January alone, and some 100 political and community leaders have been assassinated as campaigning has intensified, according to a report by the Monitor for Constitutional Freedom and Bill of Rights, an Iraqi advocacy group.

Still, there are strong hopes among Iraqis, their political candidates and U.S., European and United Nations observers that a good vote -- that is, a vote widely seen as relatively honest and which enjoys a heavy turnout -- will boost Iraqi's fledgling democracy.

Irregularities, to be sure, already have been found. There were many missing names on some voter registration rolls in Sunni areas when soldiers went to vote. With some 300,000 Iraqi and foreign election observers monitoring the vote, Mr. Maliki's government promised that voters whose names are missing from registration books would be allowed to cast provisional ballots until voter registration could be confirmed.

But overall, Sunnis now seem reconciled to their minority status behind the Shiites they had ruled and oppressed for centuries. The ethnically differentiated Kurds, who have maintained significant isolation in the northern provinces from the Arab Shiites and Sunnis, also appear ready to accommodate the Sunnis that former dictator Saddam Hussein relocated to their region. They even seem ready to share the oil-rich area around Kirkuk.

Iraqis need this election to go well if the country is to have a chance of rebuilding and finding peace, and apparently Iraqis' pragmatism is at the point of accepting that, however strong their sectarian animosities.

It may well be, of course, that insurgent die-hards are merely waiting for the American withdrawal to renew their fighting. But if the election does go well, and if Iraq's new parliament can keep its secular balance and elevate democratic principles, there seems, at last, a chance for Iraq to become stable, and possibly to become a model for the Middle East. It may take another 10 years to know the real outcome, but there is room for that hope.

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