For US, new hurdles on way to Iraqi vote

In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul recently, truckloads of voter registration cards were ambushed and torched by insurgents bent on derailing national elections set for Jan. 30.

Over the month between now and the voting, Iraq will be tested by many more such acts - and probably much worse. Experts predict an uptick in suicide bombings like the one that struck a US base in Mosul last week; or assassination attempts against prominent candidates, like the suicide bombing that killed 13 at the offices of Abdul Azziz Hakim, a leading Shiite politician, on Monday. He was not injured.

But other challenges will be at least as decisive in determining whether the elections - and the resulting government - are ultimately deemed legitimate and thus a success, experts say. Among those factors will be the level of participation from the key minority Sunni population, and support for the process from Iraq's neighbors.

"I'm going to be watching for measures to ameliorate the problem of Sunni under-representation," says James Dobbins, director of International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND Corp. in Arlington, Va.

"Without some adjustment to the electoral system the Sunnis are likely to end up with representation based not on the 20 to 25 percent of the population they actually represent but on the 5 to 10 percent that might end up voting, and that risks pushing Iraq towards even more conflict."

That is looking increasingly likely, with the Iraqi Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni political party, declaring Monday that it will boycott the vote because of continued violence and concerns about low turnout.

On Tuesday, at least 24 were killed across the Sunni heartland in the center of Iraq - 19 of them policemen - providing evidence of the deepening challenge. The attacks followed an Internet statement attributed to Osama bin Laden in which he declared that all voters in the election will be deemed "infidels" and fair game for attacks.

If Sunni areas fail to vote, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the elected assembly should at least acknowledge the Sunni minority: "For the government to be representative and for the government to be effective, the transitional national assembly would certainly have to take into account the ethnic mix," Mr. Powell said.

One option for dealing with the looming prospect of limited Sunni representation, says Dobbins, would be for Iraqi leaders to amend election laws to allow for "reballoting" in areas of very low participation in the elections. That would put off determining final results for some period, but could pay off in terms of stability.

Others agree that the Sunni challenge must be addressed now - or left to cause deeper problems later. "It's really a key question, but I do think there are ways to address it now that actually leave the remedy to under-representation until after" the elections, says Henri Barkey, a former State Department Iraq specialist now at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.

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