Sistani and the prospect for Iraqi elections

Ever since I read this piece by Dexter Filkins in today’s NYT, I’ve been casting around for more information about Sistani’s current positions.
It led with this:

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the nation’s most powerful Shiite leader, is growing increasingly concerned that nationwide elections could be delayed, his aides said, and has even threatened to withdraw his support for the elections unless changes are made to increase the representation of Shiites, according to one Iraqi source close to him.

That source was almost certainly Hamid Khaffaf, described as “one of Ayatollah Sistani’s top aides” and cited in the very next para.
The AP carried a story tonight in which reporter Denis Gray wrote:

Hamed al-Khafaf, an aide to al-Sistani, told The Associated Press that the poor security situation should not be taken as a pretext to postpone the vote.
Asked if al-Sistani is worried that the elections might be delayed, al-Khafaf said, “what we say is we stress that the elections should take place on time and be supervised by the United Nations.”
Al-Khafaf said al-Sistani wants the elections “to be held in a way that Iraqi people will be represented with all the sects and ethnic groups.” But he denied that the cleric might withdraw his support for the election if his concerns are not addressed.

So it seems it’s unclear whether Sistani is actually threatening a possible pullout from the upcoming election process at this point, or not.
Sistani’s support for the election process is a completely necessary (but not on its own, sufficient) condition for the elections to be held successfully in January, and afterwards to be judged fair enough by enough Iraqis that the body elected is judged by them to be legitimate.
Those will be, of course, highly nuanced and subjective judgments. But they are the only ones that will matter. Given his proven track record of popular influence so far, Sistani has the power to withold (though probably not, on his own, to confer) legitimacy on the whole election process.
Americans concerned about how to support a legitimate election process in Iraq–a step which is a totally necessary component of any policy that avoids complete chaos and disaster for the American forces there–should be paying a lot more attention to Ayatollah Sistani and a lot less to parsing the preening, strutting pronunciamentos of US-annointed stooge Iyad Allawi.
(Hey, ever wonder where Allawi learned to preen and strut like that?)
Anyway, Filkins is probably the guy with–so far– the best info from Sistani’s man, Khaffaf:

According to Filkins, his sources (presumably mainly Khaffaf) indicated that Sistani is worried not only about the prospect of a delay in holding the elections, but also about the possibility that the big parties now inside the transitional administration will form a single list in the election that,

would artificially limit the power of the Shiites, who form a majority in the country.
Under an agreement reached among exile groups in the early 1990’s, the Shiites were said to make up about 55 percent of the population. Ayatollah Sistani, the sources say, believes the Shiite population has swelled since then and therefore would be underrepresented on any list based on a 55 percent figure…
According to an Iraqi close to Ayatollah Sistani who spoke at length with him last weekend, the ayatollah is so upset about the prospect that the Shiites might be underrepresented that he is prepared to withdraw his support for the elections if his concerns are not addressed. It is unclear, however, what specific demands he has made.
“If he sees that what this is leading to is unfair and unfree elections, then he will not take part in it,” the Iraqi said. “He will declare the elections to be illegitimate.”

Filkins added that Sistani had expressed his concerns in a message to former UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, though the UN in New York said they’s heard nothing of that. And the UN’s current envoy, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi of Pakistan, “could not be reached for comment.”
Filkins wrote:

It was unclear late Wednesday precisely what Ayatollah Sistani sought from Mr. Brahimi or others at the United Nations. Mr. Khaffaf declined to discuss what Ayatollah Sistani would like Mr. Brahimi to do, other than to say, “The most important thing now is to hold the election at the specified time.”
As concerned as Ayatollah Sistani is about early elections, he appears to be equally worried that the democratic process may be usurped by the well-financed major parties, nearly all of which flourished in exile and cooperated with the American occupation…
“Ayatollah Sistani’s concern is that the elections are being controlled and managed by the political parties that took part in the government,” said the source close to Ayatollah Sistani.

If this is his concern, then maybe he should have given more thought over recent months to establishing one or more political parties that express his own political vision?? But no. As Juan Cole and others tell us, Sistani has traditionally been a political “quietist”… so that puts him at something of a disadvantage when the game is a political contest between competing parties…
I have meanwhile been thinking a little about the different kinds of outcomes that could flow from these elections. The only good one would be an election that takes place before the end of January 2005, and in which enough Iraqis take part, and the mechanisms are visibly fair enough that the election results end up being actively endorsed by the vast majority of Iraqis.
In other words, you could have a few very small parties boycotting it, a small number of apparent irregularities in the conduct of the election… but still end up with an outcome that is generally recognized as representing the people’s will. (Think South Africa’s first democratic election, in 1994.)
But you could not have politically significant parties or other significant portions of the population boycotting the election, or have an electoral process that is flawed in more than a few small ways, and still get this result.
What about if–as Rumsfeld and other suggest– some geographic portions of the country “do not allow” the participation of the residents of those places in the elections? Could elections that are held in a free and fair manner in all the rest of the country still be recognized as “legitimate”?
I really do not see this as a possibility. The general level of support for “national unity” inside Iraq–and particularly among its Arab citizens–is still so strong that any peremptory disfranchisement by the Americans and their local puppets of any significant groups of the country’s population would render the whole election exercize suspect. Along the way, it would quite likely lead to significant groups in other parts of the country deciding to boycott the elections in protest.
Therefore, I come back to the idea that if the Americans really want the elections to go ahead successfully–a big “if” in the case of many members of the Bush administration–then they have to do everything in their power to de-escalate the tensions around the country … this being the ONLY way to give the Iraqi election workers any chance to deploy and work nationwide in time to prepare elections in January 2005. But if the continued gun-craziness of the US military is seen by significant Iraqi figures (count Sistani among them) as having been a factor preventing the timely holding of free and fair elections, then expect Sistani to make his views on this matter very effectively known.
So the conditions for holding a “successful” election are pretty clear, and pretty constrained. The number of ways in which the election plan could fail is, by contrast, huge.
The plan could fail because of a pre-election boycott by any significant party or group of parties. It could fail because the continuation of violence (or other factors) cause a further postponement in holding it, that then pisses off Sistani or other significant figures so thoroughly that they go into a position of much stronger opposition to the US presence than they have so far shown. And even if the election is held on time, and with apparently the participation of a “strong enough” majority of potential voters, the way it is conducted could still be the subject of so much internal–and perhaps also external–challenge that the results are also hotly contested…. in which case the holding of the election could itself spark further rounds of violence and internal repression throughout the country.
Boy, there are so many ways this election plan could fail! And the consequences of it failing are so dire to foresee–for the highly exposed US troops dotted throughout the country, as well as for Iraqis–that you’d think everyone involved would be just bowing down in front of the gods of free and fair elections and begging their advice on what to do to make sure these ones do not fail, and their results are not subsequently challenged.
Do we see this happening? From the US side, no. We see the military still going ahead–at the orders of their political masters–with their continuing use of violence and destructiveness against many different segments of the Iraqi population. We see Rumsfeld and Co. still blustering that sure, they can go ahead with elections even if some of Iraq’s cities are still too violent to hold them there. We see no signs of any real understanding that this path can lead only to disaster…
There seems to be some kind of never-never-land hope that a bit more violence, a bit more repression, can make everything else somehow turn out okay?
It won’t. Not if they continue doing what they are doing. Let’s hope someone in the administration can pay attention and understand that a failure to hold decent elections by next January 31 will bring about only massive chaos and harm.
I am not, however, holding my breath. These guys in the Bush administration truly seem to live in a fasntasy world all of their own.