How the elections will affect US role in Iraq

As the US reviews the results of Iraq's national elections, it may be hearing the adage, "Be careful what you wish for."

The US wanted to hand down a democracy to the Iraqi people, and in key respects these elections delivered in a big way. With no overriding majority resulting from the vote, Iraq's political leaders will have to practice the democratic arts of negotiation and compromise as they form a new government and move on to the writing of a new constitution.

That portends both good things and bad for the US. On the one hand, any abrupt move to an extreme - say, an Iranian-style theocracy - appears unlikely. Opponents like the Kurds, who made a strong second-place showing in the vote, appear to have the means to put a check on that possibility.

But at the same time, negotiations are expected to be slow, and whatever government is formed could be weak.

And that could hearten the insurgency, tempt Iraq's neighbors to meddle more, and make the government less responsive to the Iraqi people in the areas where they are interested in seeing fast improvement, such as services and the economy.

The result is that the US role in Iraq, while it may change, is not likely to be any less intense in the months to come. "This [the Bush] administration is not unhappy with these election results, but they do present new challenges and portend a different role for the US in the future," says Carole O'Leary, an Iraq specialist and expert in Kurdish affairs at American University in Washington.

One thing the elections have done is raised the hopes of ethnic groups within Iraq, she notes, and raised ethnic and sectarian fears in the region. This is seen, in particular, in the increasing focus of the region's Sunni Arabs on the rise of a Shiite-dominated Iraq.

"The Bush administration has had its hands so full with the insurgency that it has dropped the ball on some of these more esoteric issues," says Professor O'Leary. "Now they're going to have to focus on the side of these cultural complexities quite a bit more."

At the same time, however, the US is likely to find itself even more crucial to Iraq's reconstruction, since Iraqi leaders will be focused on forming a government and writing a constitution.

"It will be critical that the US focus over the next few months on helping this government produce results," says Henri Barkey, a former State Department Iraq expert now at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. "It's only realistic to anticipate a certain amount of chaos at the government level, as leadership positions are negotiated and the constitution becomes the focus," he says. "So the US will have to really be proactive in helping the government bring the water and electricity and other services that will be what the Iraqi people use to judge the merits of the whole process."

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