BAGHDAD — Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority insists that elections, set for Jan. 30, must be held on schedule.
The Sunni Arab minority demands that the vote be postponed. The Kurds also wouldn't mind a delay but are willing to go with the flow and seem to be playing both sides.
And Prime Minister Iyad Allawi? Although he says he's "determined" to have the elections on time, the top man in the U.S.-backed interim government is sympathetic to -- some say eager for -- a postponement.
"This is Iraqi politics," said Jaber Habib, a political science professor at Baghdad University, chuckling at the surfeit of competing agendas and political double-speak. "In our own way, this is normal."
The swirling debate about whether to conduct the parliamentary elections as scheduled despite a simmering insurgency underscores the ethnic, political and religious complexities of the modern Iraqi state.
For more than three decades, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party managed to keep the puzzle together with a ruthless police apparatus that favored Sunnis and tolerated no dissent or meaningful expression of ethnic and religious autonomy. But the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Hussein's regime opened the chance for Iraq's diverse peoples to air their long-repressed -- and possibly incompatible -- aspirations.
The stakes in the vote are high. Iraqis are to elect a 275-member national assembly that will choose a president and prime minister and oversee the drafting of a constitution. Voters are expected to go to the polls later in 2005 to approve or reject the document.
Sunni Muslims, many of whom view the elections as little more than a means to officially end their supremacy in Iraq, fear that the protracted violence will exclude many of them from voting and thus exacerbate their loss of power. Voter registration, which began Nov. 1 in most of Iraq, has yet to start in Al Anbar province, a Sunni-majority area north and west of Baghdad that has been at the heart of the insurgency.
Behind the Sunni temporizing, many observers argue, is a resolute refusal by some to accept a Shiite-dominated nation. Some fundamentalist Sunni Muslims view Shiites as apostates; others deride them as uneducated hicks beholden to Iranian ayatollahs.
Mainstream Sunni parties, such as the Iraqi Islamic Party, are spearheading the call for a six-month delay. Other Sunni groups, such as the influential Muslim Scholars Assn., have called for an outright boycott of the elections as long as the foreign occupation casts its shadow.
