Goose the Blog 2.0

It was several weeks ago that I suggested to Presidents Allawi and Bush that they hold secret elections to avoid violence in Iraq. This isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's pretty close.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 15 - The threat of death hung so heavily over the election rally, held this week on the fifth floor of the General Factory for Vegetable Oil, that the speakers refused to say whether they were candidates at all.

"Too dangerous," said Hussein Ali, who spoke for the United Iraqi Alliance, a party fielding dozens of candidates for the elections here. "It's a secret."

And then Mr. Ali and his colleagues left, escorted by men with guns.

So goes the election campaign unfolding across Iraq, a country simultaneously set to embark on an American-backed political experiment while writhing under a guerrilla insurgency dead set on disrupting the experiment.

With only two weeks go to before the vote, scheduled for Jan. 30, guerrillas have stepped up their attacks and driven most candidates deep indoors, and on Saturday, the authorities said they would restrict traffic and set up cordons around polling places on election day.

A result, in large swaths of the country, is a campaign in the shadows, where candidates, ordinarily eager to get their messages to the public, are often too terrified to say their names. Instead of holding rallies, they meet voters in secret, if they meet them at all. Instead of canvassing for votes, they fend off death threats.

Of the 7,471 men and women who have filed to run, only a handful outside the relatively safe Kurdish areas have publicly identified themselves. The locations for the 5,776 polling places have not been announced, lest they become targets for attacks.

The predicament for candidates was spelled out on a flier passed around town by the United Iraqi Alliance. The flier listed the names of 37 candidates for the national assembly. The 188 others, the flier said, could not be published.

"Our apologies for not mentioning the names of all the candidates," the flier said. "But the security situation is bad, and we have to keep them alive."

Some political leaders here say they are not much bothered by the candidates' lack of visibility; they point out that Iraqis will be voting for political parties, not individual candidates.

Each party has a list of candidates, who will be given seats in proportion to the number of votes each party receives. At this rudimentary stage of democracy, some say, it is remarkable enough that the Iraqis are voting at all.

"This will be an election of constituencies, not of programs like you have in America," said Adil Abdul Mahdi, the finance minister and a candidate in the United Iraqi Alliance. "The Iraqis know their people. They know who they are voting for."

But the larger issue, for many political leaders, is that the guerrilla assault to scuttle the elections has truncated political discourse and, as a result, the heart of the elections itself. If candidates can't campaign, they can't debate, and if they can't debate, voters will hardly be in a position to chart their country's destiny.

"An election is not just putting a piece of a paper in a box; it's a whole process," said Nasir Chaderji, chairman of the National Democratic Party, which is fielding 48 candidates. "We don't have that here. Candidates can't campaign because of the security situation.

"I call it the secret election."

(more here)

Secret candidates, secret polling places, secret political rallies. All we need now is a secret election day, and my plan will have been fully implemented. Let freedom ring reign!