A veiled Muslim woman reaches out to a picture of Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini Al-Sistani, posted alongside other Shiite religious figures in Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 25. (AP File Photo)

The tortuous debate about whether it will be feasible to hold elections next year in Iraq has so far been one-dimensional. It has centred on the logistics of voting amid a spreading insurgency and endemic lawlessness. Missing from the discussion has been whether or not the US-backed interim government intends to hold a free and fair election anyway. The reported reservations on this score of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered spiritual leader of the Shia Muslim majority, are thus a valuable addition to the debate.
On the one hand, Mr Sistani--according to his aides--is concerned that constituent assembly elections due in January will be delayed, causing a collision with or postponement of general elections scheduled for later in the year. From June last year, Mr Sistani rightly insisted on a democratic process to draw up a new constitution for Iraq, as the foundation stone of the legitimacy of the new order. The US-led occupation authority foolishly ignored him, ending up having to tear up three blueprints in a row, wasting precious time and Iraqi patience while armed resistance built up against it.
But Ayatollah Sistani's underlying concern is that the predominantly exiled parties Washington has promoted in Iraq are already stitching up the results of the election by negotiating a share-out of seats and putting forward a joint, single slate of candidates. Such a pre-agreed national list, favouring well-financed, US-allied expatriate politicians and excluding Sunni nationalists and Shia insurgents, would amount to a referendum rather than a contested election. It would lead to further alienation of internal Iraqi forces and almost certainly prolong and widen the insurgency.
Some of those who are arguing for a single, consensual list of candidates make the point that what Iraq needs above all at the moment is national unity. That is a perfectly respectable argument but not many of those making it can do so with a straight face.
If Iraqis are to unite behind a national project to refloat their country, it will only be because each ethnic and religious community feels it has a fair stake in a common future. That may not happen. And it will certainly not come about as a result of the manoeuvrings of emigre politicians to monopolise the fruits of office.
To that extent, Mr Sistani has again hit the nail on the head and Washington and its local nominees would be wise, finally, to pay attention.
But the Shia leader also needs to reassure the Sunni and Kurdish minorities he is not simply angling to establish his community's hegemony over Iraq.
FT.COM

Hu Jintao

Hu Jintao–s ascent to the third of the top three posts in China's hierarchy will most likely cause subtle changes in Beijing's relations with the United States and with China's neighbors North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia--but not on the sensitive issue of Taiwan.
In China, political power rests on three pillars: the Communist Party of China (CCP), the government bureaucracy and the People's Liberation Army. Hu was named chairman of China's Central Military Commission last weekend and, in effect, commander of two million men and women in the world's largest military force.
Earlier, Hu became general secretary of the CCP's Central Committee, the most important of the three posts, in November 2003 and president of China and head of the government bureaucracy in March 2003. In each case, he succeeded former President Jiang Zemin, who appears to have let loose of all but the last strings of power.
Those who look to Hu for political reform will probably be disappointed. He was ruthless in suppressing Tibetans seeking autonomy and religious freedom while he headed the party apparatus there from 1988 to 1992. In recent speeches, Hu has scorned Western democracy as a "blind alley" that would lead China to a "dead end."
Moreover, Hu is confronted by enormous domestic problems, including 40 percent unemployment and under employment, an inadequate system of health care, rampant pollution, a corrupt banking system, inefficient state-owned enterprises, and uncertain supplies of energy and raw materials for China's growing economy.
Thus, Hu may not be so confrontational as Jiang toward America, particularly when China enjoys a $150 billion export market in the U.S., by far China's largest. Moreover, the U.S., along with Japan and Taiwan, are major sources of foreign direct investment in China, providing technology and jobs.
Hu will likely be tougher on North Korea than was Jiang because he is more pragmatic, less ideological, and wants to preclude Pyongyang from selling nuclear arms and missiles to other rogue nations or terrorists.
With South Korea, Hu will continue the effort to wean Seoul away from its alliance with the U.S. and to coax the South Koreans into submissive relations with Beijing like those of China's dynastic days. China has asserted that the ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryo was actually part of China, a claim that has angered Koreans.
Hu's approach to Japan will apparently differ from that of Jiang, who stirred animosity during his visit to Tokyo in 1998 by accusing Japan of failing to acknowledge its responsibilities for World War II. In contrast, this week in Beijing Hu met with Yohei Kono, speaker of the Diet's Lower House, and sought to encourage good relations with a Japan that is becoming more assertive.
Hu will continue Beijing's policy of seeking to entice Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations into a Chinese orbit. "China has discreetly challenged U.S. presence and influence in the Asia Pacific region," Teo wrote, "putting forward Beijing's own vision of Asian regionalism."
On Taiwan, Hu shares the views of Jiang, which is to say that Taiwan belongs to China and China will use military force to conquer the island if people there do not submit. In Hu's presence this week, Jiang said he preferred "peaceful reunification" but that "we shall by no means make the commitment to forsake the use of force. This is a major political principle."
There is no reason to believe that Hu disagreed.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

Move over Ataturk, Gen Pervez Musharraf has a new role model.
"How did General de Gaulle continue in uniform all through his period as president of France," he rhetorically asked Warren Hoge of The New York Times in an interview September 20. "And France is a democratic country."
It makes sense. Gen Musharraf wouldn't want to compare himself with home-grown general-presidents--Ayub, Yahya or Zia. No one in their right mind would want to claim their legacy. So it is that Gen Musharraf is now likening himself to France's famous war hero, Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle.
There are similarities to be sure. De Gaulle it was who said that in politics it was necessary to betray either one's country or the electorate. Like the founder of France's Fifth Republic, if he must, Gen Musharraf would also rather betray the electorate. Going back on his promise to go for the mufti, come January, is a reflection of this preference. And de Gaulle it was who said politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians. Both men seem to share the same disdain for those bickering parliamentarians. The leader of the French Resistance has also been described as stubborn, supremely self-confident, a man of enormous ego, yet of enormous selflessness.
The self-comparison to de Gaulle is troublesome then in other ways, not least because Gen Musharraf, an unflinching Bushie, is emulating--l'horreur--a Frenchman. De Gaulle was a warrior-intellectual. Living in exile in London and Algiers, he linked up with and came to lead the French underground against the Nazis. He also authored a number of books while Gen Musharraf, according to his own mother, has never been the intellectually curious sort.
While in exile, Gen de Gaulle was court-martialled and sentenced to death by the Vichy. When he returned to Paris after D-Day (1944) and formed a provisional government recognised by the Allies, he was not a military ruler but a civilian interim president. A year later nation-wide elections were held and de Gaulle was duly elected to the post. In 1946, unable to cope with the limited powers his ceremonial role bestowed and unwilling to cede to the chaotic ways of the restored political parties of the Fourth Republic, he did the only honourable thing. He resigned.
In comparison, Gen Musharraf came to power through a coup in October 1999 and benefited from the Pakistani people's typically sharp anti-incumbent sentiment. He held a widely discredited referendum on his performance in April 2002 followed by a somewhat less discredited general election later that year. Parliament gave him a five-year term. In December 2003 addressing the nation after reaching an agreement with an opposition alliance on the Legal Framework Order, Gen Musharraf announced he would relinquish charge as Chief of Army Staff by January 2005.
As Ahmad Faruqui points out in The Uniform Must Go (Daily Times, September 22), we need to establish a clear distinction between cause and country. Gen Musharraf is not the state and national success pegged to one person's survival is success that is short-lived at best. The issue is not whether Gen Musharraf is a better manager than Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif (who wouldn't be?) but whether the empowerment of democratic institutions and establishment of due process should be encouraged.
So the issue that is confronting Pakistan is not about Gen Musharraf's sartorial choices. It is about holding leaders accountable and democracy established. De Gaulle's uniform was a symbol for France's struggle during World War II. Gen Musharraf's is a jarring reminder of the unremitting, rapidly rising power of the military and its forced ingress into all affairs civilian.
DAILYTIMES.COM.PK

Up and down the East Coast diplomatic corridor, heated meetings are taking place to critique what some are describing as Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's "slow-motion putsch" to snuff out Russia's fragile democracy. There is no doubt that Putin's moves represent a disturbing revival of traditional Russian autocratic centralism.
Over the past weeks, the Russian people have been subjected to terrorist assaults and losses on a scale broadly equivalent to 9/11. In critical ways, therefore, the two countries are coping with a parallel challenge. If Russia's leaders looked to the U.S. response to 9/11 as a model, what would they see? Most likely, two core themes.
First, they would note that the American response to 9/11 has been almost exclusively military. Other instruments of American policy--political, economic, social, allies--have fallen by the wayside. All other priorities of government have been subordinated to the "war on terrorism." This approach of total "with us or against us" war derives much of its ideological underpinning from the intensely pessimistic neoconservative worldview based on an absolute division between good and evil.
Schooled by the failure of liberal democratic institutions to head off either Nazism or Soviet communism, neoconservatives argue that there is no point in analyzing the root causes of a phenomenon like terrorism; the only thing to do is to get your shot in first and worry about the consequences later.
The result is an embrace of a no-holds-barred approach to terrorism that neoconservative organizations like the newly revived Committee on Present Danger dub "World War IV." Under this model, military force trumps all else, and input from the international community counts for little.
Naturally enough, this approach tends to place increased power in the hands of the central executive, as many a frustrated member of Congress has observed. Time will tell whether this is a legitimate and effective response to terrorism. But if the United States chooses this path--with all that implies for American leadership over the last 50 years, which resorted to war as a last option rather than as the default choice--then others like the Russians can and will follow.
The cry of war will echo around the world and, opportunistically, the war-makers will invoke the American model in so doing. The facts do not matter. The prospects of Russian restraint in Chechnya, never rosy, are now minimal. American appeals for politically based solutions will seem hypocritical.
Second, the Russians will see that, for U.S. policymakers, 9/11 legitimated unrelated policy objectives, notably the attack on Iraq. Conceived in the mid- 1990s, this neoconservative scheme for Iraq was based on a pipe dream of imposing U.S.-style democracy throughout the Middle East. A noble enough aspiration about which a national debate would have been in order, but one that the neoconservatives knew would never stand critical public scrutiny. Hence the obfuscations about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism to take advantage of the in-theater presence of American forces in Afghanistan for the purposes of a war against Iraq.
Again, the Russians can claim they are just following the U.S. example of using terrorism as the justification to implement a long-cherished but unrelated objective. In the neoconservative case, this was the Iraq invasion. For Putin, it is the chance to indulge his anti-democratic streak.
None of this excuses Putin's power grab or lessens the need for U.S. measures to deflect it. The real lesson is that the American actions cast a long shadow. If, as many would argue, 9/11 has encouraged some of the bleaker elements in U.S. policymaking, it is unsurprising that similarly uncompromising patterns will emerge elsewhere, as in Russia.
CATO.ORG

There are slim hopes that the Sri Lankan government and rebel Tamil Tigers will restart peace talks soon after four people, including a top renegade Tiger fighter, were shot dead in growing factional fighting in the country.
The killings on last Thursday came days after Norwegian special envoy Erik Solheim expressed his own frustrations at the on-the-ground reality between the two sides.
"Even if Jesus Christ or Buddha came, they will not be able to do this easily," Solheim told reporters last weekend soon after meeting the Tigers' political head S. P. Tamilselvan at the rebels' Peace Secretariat in this northern Sri Lankan city.
Solheim said that the Norwegians did not expect any breakthrough in the near future. "Some people think that the Norwegian facilitators are some kind of demigods or magicians. I can tell you it will not happen. It will not be finished in one visit," he said.
About 64,000 people have died in the war in Sri Lanka. Fighting has been on hold since Norway brokered a truce in February 2002, but many are worried that the current crisis could put the ceasefire under strain.
In April 2002, the Tamil Tigers pulled out claiming they were being sidelined. Later they wanted to discuss proposals for an interim government in the north--which the government of former Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe was unwilling to do. And neither has the proposal received a concrete response from the present government.
On Thursday, the main unit of the Tamil Tigers ambushed and killed a rebel known as Reggie and two of his close aides in rebel-held eastern Sri Lanka, the Tamilnet Web site said. According to police, suspected Tiger gunmen also killed a rival political activist in the capital Colombo.
Reggie was the deputy and brother of breakaway Tiger leader V. Muralitharan, better known as Karuna.
The Tigers accuse Karuna of siding with the Sri Lankan army and waging what they call a proxy war against them. But the government and the army have strenuously denied any involvement with the rebel defector.
In the meantime, Norwegian envoy Solheim met with President Chandrika Kumaratunga in an attempt to shift attention from the deadlock to gains achieved from the 2002 ceasefire.
"Everyone should appreciate the enormous benefit of this no war-no peace situation. If war had been here, maybe 10,000 or 20,000 people would have been killed," he said.
The benefits have undoubtedly been immense. At the Kilinochchi Central College, the student population has increased more than hundred percent since the ceasefire--from 662 in 2001 to 1,585 this year.
"Children are now eager to come to school," the college's principal P. Muttaiah told IPS.
Until the ceasefire was declared, the Tigers had been fighting for a separate state for Tamils in Sri Lanka's north and east. They argued that the Tamils have been discriminated against by successive majority Sinhalese governments.
But, as peace talks progressed, the Tigers dropped their demand for independence and said they would settle for regional autonomy--a major concession.
A resumption of hostilities would roll back whatever has been achieved during the almost three years of peace.
"If war breaks out all this would be lost," Kilinochchi Central College principal Muttaiah said.
ANTIWAR.COM