During his trip to Iraq, Vice President Joe Biden told reporters that "a successful parliamentary election -- slated for January -- would go a long way toward resolving lingering political tensions here." This has been a primary assumption shaping American strategy for a long time. The timing of U.S. troop withdrawals was explicitly designed around the perceived need to keep a larger troop presence through the elections to provide security. The implicit premise has always been that once those elections are held, the security problems will recede and a more rapid withdrawal could commence.
I've always questioned those assumptions -- both that a large U.S. troop presence would play an important or positive role in the Iraqi elections, and that the election would be a decisive moment which would transform the security calculus. Has anything happened over the last few months which might lead U.S. officials to rethink their assumptions?
Let's see. In Lebanon, elections in June led to a moment's euphoria in Washington, Riyadh and elsewhere as the March 14 coalition won a surprisingly large victory. Tortuous coalition negotiations then proceeded for months, until PM-designate Saad Hariri finally threw in the towel (he will likely be asked to try again). Lebanese politics looks pretty much like it looked before the election, only with more uncertainty over whether the deal granting the opposition a blocking third in the cabinet would hold.
In Iran, elections in June threw the country into turmoil over the blatant intervention by the hard-liners in the regime to block the surging reformist trend. The electoral fraud generated an upsurge of protest and then fierce repression, resulting in an Iranian regime which currently shows little sign of falling (despite the hopes of many) and whose politics have shifted far to the right. Negotiations on the nuclear issue have been put on endless hold, at least until the Obama administration wisely decided to go ahead with talks in early October. But those negotiations will clearly now be more difficult, and the drumbeat for sanctions and war has grown stronger.
And in Afghanistan, elections in August meant to create a legitimate government capable of working with the revamped American counter-insurgency mission were marred by such massive fraud that they seem likely to produce a less legitimate and more unstable government than before. Many of the strategists who placed their hopes on those elections now worry that they will be a turning point in the other direction, destroying rather than saving the American-led mission.
The similarity in American thinking about the role assigned to elections in the Iraqi and Afghan case bears particular attention. In each case, the elections are supposed to do very specific things for American strategy: legitimate the political order, bring excluded challengers into the political process, resolve enduring political conflicts, create a political foundation for the counter-insurgency campaign. In Afghanistan, the opposite appears to have happened. Should this worry those assigning the same hopes to Iraq?
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