Carrots and Sticks in Post-Election Iraq

"Soccer?"

"Yes, soccer," replied Sheikh Anwar al-Ethari, a rising young Shiite sheikh in charge of seven mosques in Baghdad's teeming slum known as Sadr City. "This is how our neighborhood is defeating the terrorists. Nothing else has worked, but the people now have figured out that if we sponsor soccer matches and other games late into the night, people stay outside and the neighborhood is safe because the terrorists can't sneak in and out of the neighborhood and plant any bombs or engage in any other violence."

Al-Ethari-who has a sociology degree from Baghdad University and eight years of study at the famed Hawza seminary in Najaf-is a disciple of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most senior Shiite religious-and thus by default, political-figure in Iraq. His enthusiasm for finding nonviolent responses to insurgency, terrorism, and the occupation that fuels them reflects both Sistani's theological preference, and his political assessment that majority Shiite rule in Iraq can best be secured through democracy rather than violence and sectarianism.

Depending on Sistani's true intentions, the next months could see an unprecedented flowering or frustration of Iraqi-and through it, Middle Eastern-democracy. This in turn will affect the timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Since the U.S. invasion toppled the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath party and ended nine decades of minority Sunni domination, observers have speculated about how the country's newly empowered Shiite majority would react. Would they seek to import an Iranian-style Islamic revolution and create a theocratic state? Would they play by the rules being laid down by Washington and its Iraqi expatriate allies and allow a pro-American Iraqi government-with access to Iraq's immense oil resources-to emerge? Or would they chart an independent course?

The Jan 30 elections offer the first opportunity to get an Iraqi answer to these questions, because it is the first time since the U.S. invasion that Iraqis themselves will choose their political leadership. The participation of five groups is crucial to a truly representative result:

The first two are the country's minority Sunni and Kurdish populations. For different reasons-among the Sunnis, the insurgents' threat of violent retaliation, among the Kurds, heavy snowstorms in their territory in northern Iraq-they might not vote in numbers corresponding to their shares of the population.

The third group is Iraqi women, who have been virtually imprisoned in their homes since the invasion because of rampant violence and lawlessness. With the public sphere literally closed to them, they have watched the social freedoms achieved under the Hussein regime threatened by the growing dominance of conservative religious forces.

The fourth group is the significant number of relatively secular Iraqis who dominated the culture until Saddam's post-1991 embrace of Sunni symbols and institutions. Without their participation in Sunday's vote, religious factions will be empowered to draft a more theocratically inclined Constitution-at the expense of women and secular Iraqis.

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